The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  That was a little less than seven years ago.

  This street, he thinks. As wretched as it is, it gave him the two people he cares about, it gave him the only real home of his life.

  He sees the first few bar girls of the evening, the early birds, filtering through the crowd, chattering like actual birds and flirting for practice. Rose and Miaow should be on their way to the Imperial by now, to the ridiculously expensive suite. Rose had been the most beautiful of all these young women once, the queen of Patpong, when he met her.

  Looking at the bar workers, he realizes what he hasn’t been thinking about: the woman with the birthmark. As he reaches for his phone to remind Arthit, it rings. And it’s Arthit.

  “I need you to meet me,” Arthit says.

  “Where?” Without waiting for an answer, Rafferty says, “That bar girl with the—”

  “That’s it,” Arthit says. “I need you to identify her.”

  “Oh,” Rafferty says. Then a huge amount of air forces its way out of him, and he squeezes his eyes closed and says, “Oh, no.”

  “You have something to write with?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He wants very badly to break something.

  “It’s pretty awful,” Arthit says. He gives Rafferty an address. “Have you eaten?”

  “Not yet.”

  Arthit says, “Probably for the better.” A moment goes by, and he adds, “And I’m pretty sure he left a message for you.”

  Rafferty’s up, miming writing on the air to tell the restaurant staff he needs his check, even though the food hasn’t come. “What is it?”

  “You need to see it.”

  The first things he sees, around Arthit, who’s in front of him, are the fingers of her right hand, which are curved as peacefully as those of someone who’s sleeping, But then Arthit steps aside, and he sees the rest of it: the blood on the bed, the garishly ornamented face. Against the rust-brown pool that surrounds her, and against the crude, mocking scrawls of makeup on her lips and eyes, the skin of her face is startlingly, angelically, white. Her birthmark, unsoftened by foundation, brings to Rafferty’s mind the awful, fraudulent color of the grape-jelly handprints.

  She had not put the cartoonish makeup on. Rafferty had seen her real makeup, and while it had been thick, it was artfully done. This was slashed on, crookedly and maliciously: big, uneven scarlet lips, hard-edged spots of rouge on her cheekbones, eyelashes drawn with an eyebrow pencil, so long they go straight through her eyebrows to her forehead and down her cheeks to her chin.

  “It’s her,” he says. He swallows hard and turns away, feeling a rush of heat in his face and seeing gnats swarming the air in front of his eyes. He says, “And I’m going to kill him.”

  “I understand the feeling.” Arthit takes Poke’s arm and leads him from the tiny apartment, just a cement floor, a thin mattress, a limp little bouquet wilting in a glass jar on the floor near the pillows. On the wall hang a couple of birthday cards, a careful braid of cheap gift-wrap ribbons, and pictures of the girl taken years ago, her face village-girl clean, her smile broad and eager. The hand raised in each photo to cover her cheek might have looked coy if you hadn’t already seen the birthmark. Happy forever, she’s flanked by girls, probably the friends who young people think will be with them forever.

  At the door Rafferty stops. People have gathered at one end of the hall, held back by two uniformed cops. The tenants, if that’s what they are, are silent and curious. Some of the women give the flint-beneath-the-skin impression that says they might be bar workers or some other kind of pro. A crime-scene officer pushes past Arthit into the apartment with a curious glance at Rafferty’s face and closes the door behind him. “The fucker spent the night with her,” Rafferty says.

  “Shhhh. They don’t yet know, at least officially, that there’s been a death,” Arthit whispers. “The landlord asked us to soft-pedal it. Half of them will move out to avoid the ghost.” He leads Rafferty down the hall, away from the onlookers. When they’re a few yards farther away, Arthit says, “Why? Why do you say he spent the night?”

  “Her face. Under that makeup her face was absolutely clean. Rose told me that when she was working, last thing she did every night was wash her face, and I mean she really scrubbed it, washing off the whole night and everything that went with it. This girl was sensitive about that birthmark, she’s covering it in her pictures. She went to work already made up. If he’d knocked on the door in the morning, she would have at least slapped on some powder or something before she let him in. No, he was here last night, when she washed her face. She knew him well enough to let him see her without the makeup, to let him see the birthmark. He probably told her he liked the birthmark, that . . . that she was—” His throat seems to have closed, and he clears it forcefully and says, “He probably said she was beautiful.” He kicks the corridor wall. “The sick fucker spent the night with her, made love to her, and then did that. And left me that message.”

  “I haven’t shown you the message—” Arthit begins.

  “The makeup. He turned her into a parody of a bar girl. Making sure I’d understand. He was killing Rose, metaphorically, same way he was killing Miaow when he murdered that street child. Didn’t want me to miss the parallel, so he does that . . . that travesty on her face.” He feels his voice thickening and forces himself to breathe and then swallow, but it doesn’t help. “Jesus, Arthit, she was just a harmless young woman. She . . . she didn’t think she was pretty, and she was self-conscious about it—she curled her hair, probably for hours every day, she tried to hide that mark on her cheek.” He realizes he’s pressed his hand to his own cheek and lowers it. “You know, she did what she had to do, day in and day out, not hurting anyone, just waiting or hoping for something good to happen. Goddamn him.”

  “I agree, I agree.” Arthit is patting Poke’s shoulder. “It’s terrible.”

  “I need to see my wife,” Rafferty says.

  “First you have to look at something. It was clearly left for you.”

  “What?”

  “The message.” Arthit turns, gives the group of people at the other end of the short hall a brief, businesslike smile, and goes back to the apartment door. He knocks once, and when the door is opened, he says a few words and is handed a brown paper bag. Tucking the bag under his arm, he returns to Rafferty, pulling on latex gloves. With his back to the onlookers, he opens the bag and pulls out a bloodied copy of Rafferty’s book Looking for Trouble in Thailand. Rafferty reaches for it, but Arthit pulls it away and shakes his head.

  “I think it’s extremely unlikely that this belonged to her,” Arthit says. “He left it underneath her so we’d find it.”

  “Did he write something in it?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Arthit opens the book, and Rafferty sees the piece of thicker paper—like an index card but bigger—that’s just barely sticking out of the top edge of the pages. Arthit tugs it out and turns it to him. “What does this mean to you?”

  Rafferty looks down at it and feels himself squint. The card is blank except for three numbers and two symbols. It’s obviously another laserjet or inkjet printout; no one could ink them in so evenly by hand.

  1 √

  2 √

  3

  “Means the same to me that it probably does to you,” Rafferty says. “He wants to tell me he’s behind both of these killings and that there’s a third on his list.”

  Arthit says, “I was thinking that, too, but then I wondered about the three, whether it might be an allusion to your family, the three people in—”

  “I’m sure you’re right. And you know what? He wants us to wonder. Because he’s going to explain it. He’s burning to explain it. This is just a topic for a speech. I know to the marrow of my bones that he wants me to obsess over it until he can take the stage again, and he’s going to deliver that monologue if it kills him.”

>   Arthit folds the bag down, tight against the book’s edge. “Let’s hope it does,” he says.

  18

  The Stench of Men

  All day long, ever since the dream at Arthit’s house woke her up, Treasure has been smelling men again.

  For a few weeks after Dok and Chalee found her and brought her to the shelter and she discovered—to her surprise—that she could escape and didn’t want to, she had stopped being aware of the smell, she had stopped scenting them around corners or on the things they’d touched. But now it’s back.

  The stench of men, the heaviness of their smell, the reek that always makes them seem even closer than they are. The throat-jamming smell that had filled her nostrils when her father dragged her onto his knee and squeezed the pressure points on the sides of her neck to force her to open her mouth so he could imitate her voice and make her seem to say the words he wanted to hear from her. The smell of his friends. The sharp, ammoniac smell she associated with Paul, or Varney, or whatever his name was.

  It was a new dream. She was in a big room, a kind of room she’d seen only in magazines, enormous and empty and dim, with marble floors and dark pictures on the walls. She couldn’t see what the pictures represented, because when she looked at them, the patterns on the canvas shifted around. The meaning would almost declare itself when she looked just past it—a face, a figure—but when she tried to make it out, the image was gone and in its place was a vertiginous smear of color.

  There was some kind of music playing somewhere, maybe one of those old instruments that was almost a piano, the little ones that sound kind of tinny, that were on the covers of the classical CDs her father sometimes listened to. The music her father liked was old and jittery and fast, a lot of instruments all at once and no voices, with notes all over the place. When she liked it, which wasn’t often, the notes from the tinny little piano were like handfuls of diamonds thrown into a sunny room, hard and bright and full of rainbows. When she didn’t like it, the notes were needles of ice, drilling through the air almost too fast to see, driving themselves into her skin.

  She didn’t like these notes. They made her want to put up her hands to ward them off. She couldn’t tell which of the room’s doorways they were coming through. There was a big open doorway in the center of each of the three walls she could see, and the space on the other side of the doors was velvet black. She was in the center of the room with her back to the wall she couldn’t see, as far from the doors as possible. She was certain that something was going to come through one of the doors.

  And then she knew, all the way to her gut, that what she was afraid of was already here, in the room with her. She wanted—she needed—to turn her head and look behind her, but her neck was rigid as though her—her father was squeezing it, and then the music stopped; it didn’t finish, it just stopped, and she heard a noise behind her, the scrape of something hard sliding over something hard. As she tried to force her head around, the room flickered and brightened for a second, growing lighter and then the light dying down, and she sensed movement above her and looked up—it took no effort to look up; her head slid up and down easily but refused to turn left or right—to see a large spider shadow on the ceiling. The spider immediately resolved itself into the shadow of a hand with the fingers outspread, curling and straightening, and then the shadow was obliterated in a flare of light, and she turned her entire body to see Paul lifting his arms toward her, opening them to receive her, his hands balls of flame.

  Smoke enveloped her, but it didn’t smell like smoke. It smelled like men. The smell got stronger and sharper, edged with whiskey, and she knew that it was her father, that her father was right behind her, in his chair, and that one step back, one step away from Paul’s flaming hands, would put her in her father’s lap. She felt his fingers on her bare thigh.

  “You were really screaming,” Chalee says. “Even Mrs. Anna—”

  “I still could smell him, after I woke up,” Treasure says. Her heart is slamming in her chest again, the way it had the previous night. “And when she came in, when Mrs. Anna came in, I could smell her . . . her husband on her, like some of his smell had rubbed off.”

  Treasure and Chalee sit close together on a bare canvas cot, but Dok has claimed a wooden box a few feet away, as though he knows this is really a girls’ conversation and they might at any moment kick him out of the room. Chalee says, “You didn’t seem afraid of him this morning.”

  “I learned not to show it. My, my father liked it when I showed it.”

  Dok says, “Can you smell me?”

  Treasure shakes her head. “You just smell like Dok.”

  “Yeah?” Dok says. He plucks his shirt to his nose and sniffs. “What do I smell like?”

  “Like a friend, I guess.”

  Dok ducks his head and blushes at the floor.

  The three of them are crowded into the corner farthest from the stairs on the building’s second floor, where the girls sleep. Like the first floor, it’s big—it can accommodate thirty cots in rows of six, with a meter separating the head and foot of each pair and aisles between the rows wide enough for two girls to walk through side by side. Like the first floor, it’s dusty and hot and fragrant with mice. Unlike the first floor, it boasts faded curtains, actually old pillowcases, that hang limply over its windows, Boo’s instinctive recognition of female modesty and the fact that there are men out there who want to see the things the girls in the shelter are modest about. Because of the curtains, the room is dim except for the slashes of late-afternoon sunlight on the floor, light that has edged its way in through the gaps between the pillowcases.

  Treasure can hear the buzz of the second floor’s permanent population of flies. Other than the three of them, the room is empty except for one ragged new girl, eight or ten years old, dark-skinned and mosquito-bitten on her cheeks and forehead, who either sleeps or pretends to sleep on a cot halfway across the room.

  “Can you smell all men?” Dok asks.

  “Mostly. Some of them smell more. Young ones don’t smell as much, or anyway not bad. Boo smells like a clean room.”

  Chalee says, “I can smell the stuff he puts on his hair.”

  “I smell through those things,” Treasure says. “Perfumes and stuff. I smell right through it, to the man.”

  “What about Poke?” Chalee asks.

  “Poke smells like . . .” Treasure squints and wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know. Linen? He smells a little like girls, like his wife and daughter.”

  “Poke always looks so clean,” Dok says. “I’d like to look that clean.”

  Chalee says, “I can’t smell Mrs. Anna’s husband.”

  Treasure wraps some of her hair around an index finger and tugs. “He smells like leather.”

  There’s a long silence, broken by the girl on the cot, who sits up and says, “Leather?”

  “Like a belt,” Treasure says. “Or a . . . ummmm, a strap. A leather . . . a leather strap.”

  “I can’t smell any of them, really,” Chalee says.

  The girl on the cot says, “Everybody stinks,” and lies down again, her back to them.

  Dok says to Treasure, “Are you really not going back with Mrs. Anna?”

  Treasure closes her eyes and leans to the left, against Chalee’s shoulder. Chalee smells to her like Mrs. Anna’s soap. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not,” Chalee says. “I wouldn’t go back for anything.”

  “Then I won’t,” Treasure says. “I couldn’t be there alone.”

  “That’s silly,” Chalee says. “They want you.”

  Treasure takes her head off Chalee’s shoulder. “I can’t be in the house with him if you’re not there, too. And I like it here. I guess.”

  Dok says, “I don’t.”

  Treasure looks at him for a long moment. “Then why do you stay? Why not go back to . . . to wherever you were
before?”

  Dok and Chalee exchange a look, and Chalee says, “It was no good.” Treasure starts to speak, but Chalee cuts her off. “I mean really no good.”

  Dok says, “Men,” and then he’s blinking fast and staring at the nearest curtained window as though he can see straight through it.

  Between her teeth Treasure says, “I hate men.”

  “Me, too,” says the mosquito-bitten girl on the cot. “Every one of them.”

  “I like some men,” Dok says. “I like Poke and Boo and Father Bill.”

  “I’d leave in a minute,” Treasure says, “if I knew someplace safe.”

  To the girl on the cot, Dok says, “Where were you before you came here?”

  “Street,” the girl says. “Don’t go.”

  “We’ve been,” Chalee says. To Treasure she says, “Mrs. Anna loves you.”

  “Mrs. Anna doesn’t even know me,” Treasure says. “She wants a child, and she’ll settle for me. And I don’t want a . . . a father. Not now, not ever.”

  The girl on the cot says to Treasure, “Someone wants you? Is that what you said?” Her voice is hoarse, as though she’s been screaming.

  “Yes,” Treasure says.

  “Are they mean? Will they treat you badly?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Will the man bother you?”

  Treasure is silent for a moment, looking up at the closed curtains. “Probably not.”