The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Bingo,” Ernie says, and then he says again, “. . . ingo,” but he sounds farther off, and then, farther away still, he says, “Ingo, going go, going to go,” and the lights of Thai Heaven flicker and die, and Ernie’s gone, and the music gets louder, and the water in the canal rises up like a wall, black and putrid, as the sky shimmers and brightens with the false dawn of exploding ordnance just over the horizon, and there’s nothing for Wallace to swing his hand against, so he drops to his knees and punches the road with all his strength and sits up in bed.

  The window is on the wrong side of the room, he thinks, and then he says out loud, in a voice that’s all breath, a voice that sounds like he’s been kicked in the stomach, “Ernie. What does Varney have to do with me, Ernie?”

  14

  Showing You Who He Is

  Stiff-faced, Arthit glares at the little white card for the fourth or fifth time, turning it over again, checking the back, just as he has every time he’s picked it up, as though he might have missed something there. He’s wearing plastic gloves in spite of the fact that they’re probably useless; half the people in the Expat Bar, plus Rafferty and Rose, have handled the damn thing. Still, he’ll take it in for prints when he reports to the obscure substation to which he’s been exiled.

  “‘Where is she?’” he reads aloud, and as though on cue, there’s a burst of laughter from the room that Treasure and Chalee are sharing, the room that Anna is in now, too, getting the girls ready to head over to the shelter for school. It’s early Monday morning. The daytime thug, Pradya, is waiting in his car just outside, and Rafferty has prevailed on the nighttime thug, Sriyat, to follow them a couple of cars back, looking for anyone else who might be trailing along, and do a quick check of the shelter’s neighborhood before he goes home to bed.

  Arthit glances at his watch. “They should be on their way. It’s getting late.”

  “Class won’t start until Anna gets there.”

  “It’s Father Bill,” Arthit says, and there’s an edge to it. “We’re on tiptoe, trying to show him how dot-the-i’s we can be.”

  They’re at the dining-room table, the fish traps pushed to a corner to make room for the papers that Arthit brought home from the station on Sunday evening and spread all over the surface. Anna and the girls had eaten breakfast in the kitchen, and the strain among them seems to have thawed somewhat, because the girls had chattered and Anna had joined in, and every now and then they’d dissolved into giggles. Rafferty can only imagine how hard Anna must be working to keep up with the kids’ words. “Father Bill has a lot on his plate,” he says.

  “He’s a saint,” Arthit says, raising both palms to rebuff the implication that he’d meant anything negative about Father Bill. “I have no idea how he does what he does. I’ve only got two of them here, and it’s all I can—” He breaks off and smiles, a bit overbrightly, at someone behind Rafferty.

  “We’re ready to go,” Anna says, coming in from the living room, dressed in the slightly official-looking dark slacks and blouse that constitute her teaching uniform. She widens her eyes as a call for attention and holds up one of her blue cards, on which she’s written, Say something about their clothes. Then she says, out loud to Poke, “We all went shopping last night after you left. Your big friend followed us.”

  Arthit says, “He fit right in, especially in the girls’ clothing stores.”

  The girls file into the room. Treasure seems barely to be present—she’s pulled back, Poke thinks, into the protective shell she wore at her father’s. Chalee is aglow with pride, but behind it Rafferty senses a kind of frazzled desperation. Wearing a big smile, she looks rapidly from one of them to the other, never pausing to hold anyone’s gaze, and then lowers her eyes to the clutter of paper on top of the table as though she expects to find something about herself there.

  “Don’t you both look nice,” Arthit says, sounding like someone who’s rehearsed the line a hundred times and is finally saying it in front of an audience and knows he’s getting it wrong.

  “Don’t they?” Anna says after a moment’s silence. The girls’ clothes are so new that Rafferty can practically hear them squeak.

  “Let me guess,” he says, diving in. “You two switched your shirts.”

  Chalee gives an enormous blink, but Treasure’s gaze is steady, and she turns her head a few inches to regard him from the corners of her eyes. Chalee says, “How did you know?”

  “I see all those orange ruffles on Treasure’s . . . uh, blouse and I think Chalee. I see the little blue anchor on the pocket of yours and I think Treasure.”

  Looking at her feet, Chalee says, “I never went to a store before. I think I picked out things that were too fancy.” Her face is red. “When I see Treasure wearing that blouse—”

  “It’s a beautiful blouse,” Treasure says. She glances at Rafferty and instantly away again, then clears her throat. “I talked you into letting me wear it.”

  “All my stuff looks like that,” Chalee says despairingly. “Like they’re in a cartoon. When I look at Treasure’s clothes—”

  “You chose lovely things, Chalee,” Anna says. She’s kept her eyes on Chalee’s lips as the girls spoke. “But if you want to trade them, we can go back this afternoon.”

  “I want clothes like Treasure’s,” Chalee says.

  “Well, I’m keeping this,” Treasure says. She tugs at a random ruffle. “I like it.”

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Anna says. “We’re going to be late.” She shoos the girls out of the room.

  “How did you know that?” Arthit asks. It’s half whisper, half hiss.

  “I didn’t. I just guessed. That blouse was a poor kid’s idea of fancy. But if I’d been wrong, they both would have jumped all over me, and they’d have liked it even better. Kids love to be right.”

  “It pisses me off that you know how to talk to them,” Arthit says. “I say hello, and I feel like I’m doing an interrogation.”

  “Arthit. I’ve had seven years of Miaow. It took me a year to get anything out of her except yes and no.”

  Arthit lifts a hand and focuses on the table in front of him, clearly listening. In less than a minute, the front door opens. “Goodbye!” Anna calls, and then the door closes again.

  Rafferty says, “Classy gesture on Treasure’s part, trading blouses or shirts or whatever they are.”

  “They’re like sisters, and that’s both good and bad,” Arthit says. “I already doubt that I’m up to it. Treasure, I mean. She works so hard to seem confident, on top of things. But she jumps whenever there’s a loud noise, and last night she had a bad dream, woke up screaming, and wet the bed. It took Anna an hour to calm her down, and then she climbed into bed with Chalee.” He rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, his eyes squeezed shut. “I’m not supposed to know that happened. I didn’t dare go into the room with Anna.”

  “It’s who she is, Arthit. Actually, I think she’s behaving pretty well, considering what her father put her through. And it’s not going away anytime soon.”

  “When you first took Miaow in—” Arthit begins.

  “Not the same. Miaow was very complicated, and she didn’t trust either of us, but the street had made her . . . I guess the term is ‘self-sufficient.’ On a practical level, she could take care of herself, dress herself, feed herself, defend herself within reason. I think it was a year before she said thank you for anything. Emotionally, she was a wreck. No one had ever loved her. Her parents weren’t even a dim memory. But Treasure had it even worse. There were two people who were supposed to love her. But her father beat her, terrified her, treated her like a ventriloquist’s doll, and her mother hid in bottles of whiskey and codeine, so loaded she had a maid whose main job was to make sure she didn’t burn the house down. So Treasure’s problems are, maybe, deeper than Miaow’s were.”

  Arthit says, “But look at Miaow now.”


  “Rose has been pouring love into her for years. And Anna will do the same for Treasure, and eventually, or at least possibly, if everything goes right and everybody’s karma is good, it’ll bring about a miracle. You don’t have to take the lead. In fact, you shouldn’t get anywhere near her physically until she comes to you. Essentially, you can do what I did—hide behind your wife during the really rough periods and then come out and be cool when the kid’s put herself part of the way back together.”

  “Even if that would work, which I doubt,” Arthit says, “I’ve never been good with kids. And I have no idea how to be cool.”

  Rafferty raps his knuckles on the table. “Then let me ask you the big one. If she stays, do you think you could learn to love her?”

  After a silent moment, Arthit says, “Ah.”

  “Yes,” Rafferty says. “That’s pretty much it.”

  “But . . .” Arthit says. He takes a deep breath, makes a big, popping P as he blows it out, and moves some papers around in front of him. “Even if I can, how am I supposed to show it?”

  “You just feel it. If you do feel it. And when you discover that you do, focus on it and let it fill you up, because it will. Believe me, she’ll notice.”

  Arthit shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “I see.”

  “Arthit—do you want to do this?”

  He takes a stack of papers, squares them, and raps the stack’s edge against the table. “Anna does.”

  “That’s not the same—”

  “She misses her son so desperately,” Arthit says. “And that human hangnail she was married to won’t let her see him.”

  “Treasure is not Anna’s son,” Rafferty says. He pushes himself away from the table and thinks for a moment about how to frame what he wants to say. “Look, I don’t usually give advice, but when you’ve got a kid who doesn’t know who she is, it’s not a good idea to wish she was someone else.”

  “You want to know the truth?” Arthit says. “The whole thing scares me to death.”

  Rafferty gets up and picks up both of their coffee cups. As he goes through the kitchen door, he says, over his shoulder, “Good. It should.”

  Pouring the coffee, he hears Arthit say hopelessly, “And then there’s Chalee. What are we going to do with Chalee?”

  “Varney wanted us to find the boy fast,” Arthit says. “He wanted to get the message out.” He’s sitting straight now, in his professional posture, and he’s been organizing the documents into rows. Looking at the sheet squarely in front of him, he says, “Foodland manager got a call around three twenty Sunday morning, maybe four hours after you left, saying there was a fire in the closed bar, the Suction Cup, I think it used to be.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Female. Thai. ‘The bar next to you is on fire.’ Then a hang up. There’s only one bar that shares a wall with the market, so the manager ran down the alley to . . . to whatever it was.”

  “What it was, was a pit.”

  “And sure enough the door’s ajar and there’s smoke pouring out. So he kicks it the rest of the way open, the manager does, and finds two big wastebaskets on fire, filled with compressed trash, just restaurant and supermarket litter—bags, food cartons, torn-up cardboard boxes, stuff like that, but really pushed down, like an adult had stepped on it.”

  “To keep it burning longer,” Rafferty says.

  “The room was almost empty—just a few tables and broken chairs and the bar. The boy was in plain sight, on top of the bar.” He takes a deep breath. “His neck had been broken.”

  “So he died fast.”

  “Yeah.” Arthit scrubs at his mouth with an open hand, as though trying to scour away a bad taste. “I’m sure it was terrifying, but it was quick.”

  “But, you know, I’d been thinking that Varney killed the kid because he was angry. Because I hadn’t shown up, I mean. He was furious, and he took it out on the kid. But—” He clears his throat. “But four hours later? I could see it if he’d done it right away, in a rage, but—”

  Arthit says, “But he didn’t.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe he killed the kid and then sat there for a while, trying to figure out what to do next.”

  “No,” Arthit says. “Body temperature was too high. Almost normal. The boy died less than an hour before we got there.”

  “So he took his time, keeping the kid there, maybe to let the streets clear so people wouldn’t see him leave, and then he killed him,” Rafferty says.

  Arthit says, “In cold blood. And then he called attention to it. You know where this is going.”

  Rafferty feels as though his coffee might come back up. “I do.”

  “You didn’t come when he wanted you to, and he thought you might not, and he had an alternative plan in place.” Arthit pushes his chair away slightly, measuring Poke’s reaction. “He’s showing you who he is.”

  “Yeah.” Rafferty finds he needs the chair’s back, and he slumps against it. “The note he sent me Saturday night said I was going to learn what he meant by ‘or what.’”

  “Maybe just the beginning,” Arthit says.

  “He’s telling me he’s willing to murder a child to get my attention. A street child, and I’ll bet you anything you want that he knows that my daughter used to be a street child. Showing me his fucking credentials. And if I don’t give him what he wants, there’ll be more.”

  Arthit says, “He did a lot of work to draw your attention to it.” Shaking his head, he picks up the card again and again reads it aloud. “Where is she? He wants millions of dollars. He wants Treasure, for some reason. He’s saying he’ll do anything to get her.”

  Rafferty says, “I have no idea how to deal with this.”

  “Well,” Arthit begins, and then he tables what he was going to say. “Let’s calm down for the moment. Here’s what we’ve got. Using a coroner’s picture of the boy and a description of Varney, we haven’t found anyone who saw them together, and people would probably remember if they had, because that’s a combination—adult foreign man and little Thai kid—that’s not supposed to happen anymore, at least not in plain sight. But we do have two people who saw them a few feet away from each other for thirty seconds or so on the night the boy was killed.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Silom end of Patpong. One of them was on door duty at the Thigh Bar, down near the end, and the other was a vendor, practically at the beginning of the street. She also saw—the vendor, I mean—she saw Varney leaving Patpong, on the run, the night you chased the kid. He took off in one direction and the kid in another, a couple beats later.”

  “He was heading for the empty bar,” Rafferty says. “He ran the sidewalk on Silom and then turned left up Patpong 2.”

  “Probably waited with the kid until you came out of the bar, told him to count to ten or something, and took off to get to the bar ahead of you.”

  Rafferty says, “Did anyone on Patpong 2 see him go into the bar? When I got there, I saw a woman from—”

  “The Star of Light,” Arthit says. He touches three or four pieces of paper and pulls one toward him. “She’s trying to quit smoking, and everyone inside was puffing away, so she went out for some air just as he charged past Foodland and into the alley. She couldn’t describe him, except to say he had dark hair, because he was practically past her by the time she saw him, but who else could it have been? Anyway, about a minute later the kid streaked across the street and into the alley, and then she saw someone whom she described very accurately as you.”

  “She didn’t wonder what a farang and a little boy were doing in a closed bar?”

  “She did, actually, but one of her regulars showed up right after you left and dragged her inside with him, and then it got busy. She quit at two and went home, didn’t think about it again until the next morning. When she heard the news, to her credit, she called the cops.�
� He puts down the sheets of paper and paws through some others. “So four hours after Varney and the kid went into the bar, the Foodland manager calls the cops and the fire department. Our guys showed up first.”

  Rafferty gets up, just to move. At the far end of the table, he picks up one of the fish traps and turns it over in his hand, looking down at it but barely seeing it. “All this happens in that half of Patpong 1. That’s the end I come in on, when I go in at all. He may not know where I live, but he knows what direction I come from. Oh, and besides the kid, there’s the bar worker he had following me. I only really saw her once, the first night I met Varney, and she had so much makeup on over that birthmark that it was hard to see what she really looked like or how old she was. Christ, if someone else hadn’t spotted her, by now I’d be wondering if her birthmark was makeup, too.”

  “Who spotted her, and where?”

  “Ladyboy named Betty from King’s Corner. Saw her going into Cowgirl. I was going to go back for her Saturday night, but I had to get home. And if she’s the one who made the phone call to Foodland, I don’t think she’s got much of a future.”

  Arthit says, “Give me a better description.” He writes as Rafferty talks. When he’s finished, he says, “We’ll scoop her up tonight.” He looks up and asks, “Why does he want Treasure?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “Maybe that thing about her living with him if anything happened to her father was more than just talk. Maybe Murphy promised her to him.” He sits back, blinking. “Or maybe she’s Murphy’s heir. Maybe he sees her as the way to get his hands on her father’s estate.”

  The two of them silently think about that for a moment. Rafferty says, “Maybe, to look at the worst possibility I can think of, maybe Varney inherits if anything happens to her. And it could be a lot. A guy with three million in his closet might have money salted away all over the place.”

  “Well,” Arthit says, “he’s not going to get her.” He pushes his chair back as though he’s going to stand, but instead he sighs and sits still, his eyes on the rows of paper. “I’m going to work on this, unofficially,” he says, “and it’s all I’m going to do. The one good thing about being banished to the Nowhere Station is that I’m out from under Thanom’s nose.” Thanom is the superior officer who is embarrassed that Arthit saved his career. “So you and I will be holding hands, so to speak. And I know one or two other former cops whose services I can borrow to supplement your pair of hit men.”