Chalee whispers, “Almost there.”
“I’m fine,” Treasure says, and is surprised to find that it’s nearly true. Sandwiched between her . . . her friends, with walls practically touching her shoulders on both sides, with that dim patch at the end growing closer, with no silhouette making a man-shaped hole in the light, she feels almost safe, at least for the moment. Running away, she thinks suddenly, seeing herself living on the streets and in the odd corners of this enormous city, maybe even other cities, with friends who know how to survive. It would be something like freedom.
If she ran with Dok and Chalee, if they’d go with her, if she could find some way to get her hands on some of the money her father had left behind, they could hide forever. They could move from town to town, finding other kids to be with, always having enough baht for a meal or even a taxi and maybe some nice clothes once in a while. They might even ride a train. The three of them, kids with a little money and Dok and Chalee’s maps of places to hide.
A little cold-water room somewhere tucked away in nowhere, a place no one would think to look for her, with a curtained shower in the corner and a door that locks. Maybe other kids in the building they could go places with, they could—she hesitates at even thinking the word—they could play with. “I never have,” she says, and then she realizes she’s speaking out loud.
“Never have what?” Dok says, the broom skritch-skritching beneath his voice.
“Played with anybody,” she says, feeling her face redden in the darkness.
“I used to play,” Chalee says, just making conversation. “In the village.”
“What did you do?”
“We ran through the woods. Hid from each other. We jumped into the water in the paddies. We raced buffalo.”
“I raced buffalo, too,” Dok says.
Treasure says, “Is it exciting?”
“No,” Chalee says. “It’s funny, because buffalo are so slow. Everybody’s jumping up and down and cheering, and it’s like they’re walking in their sleep.”
“Then who wins?” Treasure asks.
“Nobody cares,” Chalee says. “It’s just fun.”
Treasure says, “Oh.” She thinks for a second about fun.
The dim rectangle marking the end of the passage is only a meter or two away, and Dok says, “Stay here while I look.”
Treasure says, “Give me the broom.”
“I need it,” Dok says. “I’m not walking without it.”
The broom makes its skritching noise as Dok moves slowly forward. As narrow as the passage is, he’s slender enough to hug one wall so he can look out at an angle and then change walls to check the other side. Finally he stands in the center, waits for the space of a breath or two, and pokes his head out of the opening. He looks left and right, then steps all the way out. Then he turns and waves them forward.
Chalee lets out a rush of breath, and Treasure realizes that her friend has been frightened. Both she and Dok have been frightened. Who else had ever been frightened on her behalf? she asks herself, and instantly answers the question: Poke.
Coming through the mouth of the passageway, Treasure sees a narrow, sloping street running down to the river. It’s a canyon, warehouses rising on either side, and she thinks, Hard to get out of, but Dok says, “This way,” and turns left to lead them downhill.
Chalee gives Treasure her warm hand and says, “Let him be the boss. He likes it.”
With Dok in the lead, they move down the street like people with a purpose. Treasure has seen hundreds of Thai girls holding hands with their friends, but she’s never done it before, and the feel of Chalee’s hand in hers makes her feel light-footed, almost giddy. The three of them, she thinks, with a little of her money and a whole country to play, or rather, hide in. She can’t remember ever before visualizing a life she would actually like to live. With the money she could be free of Paul.
Except that what Paul really wants, of course, is the money.
After a few minutes of drifting downhill, they cross a street that Dok says is the same one their alley begins at, and Treasure tries to visualize it all: run this way, turn that way, and get back to the shelter. Just as she thinks she has it mapped in her mind, she hears something behind her. She whirls so fast that she yanks her hand out of Chalee’s, but the street is empty.
“What?” Dok whispers.
She shakes her head. “Nothing. I just—”
Dok goes past her at a quick walk, all the way back to the cross street. He cranes his neck around and stands there, his hip thrown out and his weight on his right leg as though he thinks he might have to lift the left to run. But instead he evens his stance, takes a final look around, and ambles back down, shaking his head.
“The narrow alley,” he says to Treasure as though continuing a discussion, “is the escape route, and it can be a hiding place, too. Most grown-ups don’t even see it. And if they do, you can get out the other end.” They start walking again. “Once you’re out, you can run along down here, cross that street back there, and—come down just a little more—you can go in there.”
Across the way there’s a partially collapsed building, obviously once a warehouse, with a large word in Thai that translates to “Prince,” painted in graying letters. The rough surface of the wood has pushed its way through the paint, and Treasure has to squint to make out the word.
At that moment it begins to rain.
“Wait here,” Chalee says. “Sometimes it’s not empty.” Treasure and Dok crowd back against the building behind them, sheltering from the slant of the rain, and Chalee runs across the street and does something to the building’s door and steps back. She says a bad word that startles Treasure, not so much by the profanity as by the way her voice carries. The street is narrow and hedged by high walls, and sound travels even through the hiss of the rain.
Chalee goes at the door again and yanks outward, using both the iron bar and her free hand on the door. It emits a sustained bass note, like a sound played at half speed, that bounces back and forth across the street. By the time it fades, Chalee is standing beside the open door, leaning forward to peer in.
Treasure says, “What’s she looking for?”
“People,” Dok says. “It’s a trick to get the door open, but some other people have figured it out.”
Across the way, Chalee disappears into the darkness. A tiny flame flickers, throwing a rectangle of pale light onto the wet surface of the street. She reappears, a disposable lighter in one hand, and waves them in.
For reassurance Treasure taps her palm against the napkin-wrapped bundle at her waist and follows Dok.
The place reeks of mold and urine. They’re in some kind of office, a small room, with a door in the right-hand wall that opens into a deeper darkness that suggests a much larger space beyond. Dok pulls the front door closed and secures it with a loop of heavy wire. To Chalee he says, “Back empty?”
Chalee holds out the lighter. “It looked empty to me.”
“Okay,” Dok says. He takes the lighter and holds it high, looking around. The floor is thick with dust and rat droppings and black termite sand. A couple of fallen roof beams, two-by-fours from the look of them, lean against the rear wall. There’s a window to the left of the front door, but it’s been boarded up. “They’re as afraid of us as we are of them.”
“Who?” Treasure whispers. She wants to go back into the street.
“If it’s anybody, it’s streeties,” Dok says. “Like us, but some big ones.”
“There’s nobody there,” Chalee says. “But if it makes you feel better . . .” She pushes the door to the dark area closed and wedges a fallen two-by-four against it at an acute angle.
A rusted metal desk with a missing front leg sags despondently in the middle of the room. Dok sits on it, bringing the legless corner all the way down to the floor with a bang. “This is another hidin
g place,” he says, indicating the space with an open hand, like someone showing a room for rent. “If you want, Chalee can open that door to the storage area again and we’ll show you how to get out that way. There’s a wide alley back there, because they used to bring trucks right up to the rear doors to unload stuff.”
The rain is making dull stuttering sounds against the wooden front of the building. From a corner comes the drip of a leak. Chalee sits next to Dok on the desk, and Treasure turns to face them, her back to the front door.
“Is there anyplace else?” she asks.
“Near here, one more,” Dok says. “Near the docks. I think about hiding places in steps, nearest to farthest. The first step is the passageway next to our building. This is the second step, and there are a couple of places here in the back where you can get up, pretty high above the floor, and hide. People almost never look up. You can get out of here through the front and the back. Ow.” He lets the lighter go out, giving his thumb a rest from the heat, and says, in the warm darkness, “And the third place is near the docks.”
“How do you know about them?”
“The first thing I do,” Dok says, “when I go anyplace, is be sure I know how to get out of it.”
“You’ll learn,” Chalee says. “You’ll have to if you don’t go with Mrs. Anna.”
Treasure says, “Could you light that thing again?”
“I don’t know,” Dok says. He tilts his chin at the wall behind her. “The boards over the window let a little light out.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Chalee says. “It’s raining. No one’s out there.”
“Okay.” The lighter sparks back into life, throwing Dok and Chalee’s wavering shadows against the barricaded door.
After a moment’s pause, Treasure says, “I have money, if I could figure out how to get it.”
Neither Dok nor Chalee replies, but they’re regarding her with interest.
“My, my father had a lot of money.”
“You can tell,” Chalee says. “All the kids can tell.”
“How?”
Dok says, “Even when you were dirty, you were a different kind of dirty.”
Chalee says, “And you’re half-and-half, so there must have been someone with money sometime.”
“But what I’m saying, what I’m trying to say, is that if I could get some of it . . .” Brought out into the light like this, her vision feels thin and implausible, a fairy tale or a pirate story.
“Then what?” Chalee says. Dok is looking at her, but he seems to have retreated to a point behind his eyes, as though he’s regarding her through a mask a foot in front of his face.
“Then we could be together,” Treasure says in a rush. “We could go where we want, we’d have food and clothes—not too much, but enough. We could go places. We could . . . we could be friends forever.” She runs out of breath, almost seeing the words hanging in the air, waiting for a shaking head, a snicker. She grabs a new breath and says, “We could hide. Together.”
Chalee leans forward to speak but freezes. Treasure’s head has whipped around, and her body follows until her back is to them, and then they hear her sniff the air, three or four sharp inhalations, and she retreats a step and moans, “Noooo,” and with a screech of nails pulling free from wood, the entire front door is yanked upward and away, and the lighter blows out, and the wet, shining, heavyset man standing where the door had been says, “Treasure. What a surprise.”
23
There’s Still the Gas
Rafferty’s cell phone buzzes, bringing him out of deep sleep, and he reaches up and back, toward the headboard, but instead of finding the phone, he barks his knuckles on a wall covered in something that feels like fabric. Half conscious, he flails for a familiar surface, encountering instead mountains of pillows.
The hotel.
There’s enough light through the window to let him make out the bedside table with the heavy crystal lamp on it and, blinking away at the lamp’s base, his phone. He’d gone to sleep with it within reach, but he and Rose seem to have changed places during the night, as they sometimes do. He lifts himself on one elbow and leans across her to get his hand around the phone. Rose says something, but it takes more than a ringing phone and someone leaning on her to wake Rose up.
“Yeah.”
“Poke,” Arthit says, “Treasure is missing, definitely gone.” In the background Rafferty can hear a stream of sound from Anna. “She left the shelter with Chalee and that boy—”
“Dok. What time?”
“Don’t know exactly. My cop was at the mouth of the alley, and he swears they never came out. But about twenty minutes ago, a little girl woke Boo up. She said Treasure and the others left ten or fifteen minutes before that.”
“Nobody came to get them? Nobody took them away?”
“Not according to her. She says Treasure told her they were going out looking for things to sell.”
“She wouldn’t, not with Varney out there somewhere.”
Anna’s voice scales up, and Arthit says to her, “One more minute.”
“Where’s my guy?” Rafferty says. “Sriyat?”
Arthit says, coolly, “I have no idea.”
“It’s been less than an hour. Maybe we should—”
“Up to you, but I’m going out to look for them now. Anna will wait here.”
“Give me a little time. I’ll meet you there.” Awake at last, Rose sits up and yawns, and he leans over and kisses her and says, “I’ll be back. Sometime.”
Treasure laughs, a low, harsh rasp that brings Dok’s gaze to her. She closes her eyes and laughs some more.
“What’s funny?” the man says. He’s produced a small penlight and trained it on them.
“Thought you were—” She starts to laugh again and then, abruptly, stops. “Thought you were somebody else.”
The man in the doorway tilts his head back, surveying the room, and Treasure recognizes him. It’s Sriyat or something like that, the man Rafferty hired to watch her. He says, “Glad you’re happy to see me.”
Dok says, “What are you doing here?”
“Shut up.” Sriyat’s voice is still soft, as it had been at Arthit’s house, but there’s force behind it. “Girl,” he says to Chalee, “sit closer to your boyfriend.”
Dok puts one foot on the floor, and the man says, “Don’t do anything stupid, sonny.”
“You’re supposed to be protecting me,” Treasure says. Now that the initial relief has worn off, her voice sounds childish in her ears.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Sriyat says. “You’ve got two men on you twenty-four hours a day, which costs a bundle. They’re moving you back and forth, between nice houses and a slum, all very secret. What that says to me is that there’s money somewhere. Who wants you, and why? Is the money yours? Is someone trying to get to it through you? And how much money?”
“I’m going to tell Poke.”
“No, you’re going to answer my question. And fast, or I’m going to shoot one of your friends.” He reaches inside his coat and comes out with an automatic. “Which one?” he says. He points it at Chalee, and the penlight swivels with it.
“You wouldn’t shoot her,” Treasure says.
“No? You want to see me do it? Answer my questions. How much? Who has it?”
“My, my father. I don’t know how much—”
“Not good enough. I need to know everything.” He points the gun at Dok and waggles it side to side. “You might want to move away from her, kid, or your clothes’ll get dirty.”
“There’s a . . . there’s a letter,” Treasure says. “It’s from my . . . um, my father.” She pushes herself past the word and keeps talking. Her eyes are lifted to the ceiling, but now she brings them back down to look at Sriyat. “He wants me back, and I don’t want to go, and Poke is hiding me.”
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“Is your father rich?”
Treasure says, “Very.”
“Why don’t you want to go?”
“I hate him.”
“Why is Rafferty involved?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Treasure says. “But I think everything is in the letter. I stole it from Poke.”
Sriyat says, as though weighing it, “A letter. What’s in it?”
“I can’t read,” Treasure says. “My father didn’t send me to school. None of us went to school. We’re just learning how to read now.” She can feel Chalee’s eyes on her.
“Where’s the letter?”
“I have it.” She widens her eyes. “Maybe you can read it.”
“Is it in Thai?”
“I guess so.”
“Give it to me.”
“Will you give it back?” Treasure asks.
Sriyat smiles at her. “Sure, sure. It’s your letter, right? Give it to me.”
Treasure says, “I don’t know.”
Dok says to Treasure, “Don’t give him anything. When he’s got it, he’ll kill Chalee and me and take you with him.”
“Why would I hurt you?” Sriyat says. “It’s not like you could do anything to me. Only reason I’d shoot you is if she won’t give me that fucking letter.” He takes a step farther into the room, ducking his head to avoid hitting it on top of the doorjamb. His smell, sweat and meat and tobacco, envelops Treasure, and she thinks she might choke. “This is how it goes,” Sriyat says. “You hand me the letter, sweetie, and then we lock your friends in here to get a head start, and I take the letter to your father. You and me, we split the money. How’s that sound?”
“She’s not stupid,” Dok says.
Treasure says, “You’ll sell me to my father.”
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