The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I didn’t think so,” Miaow says. “If I felt like you, I wouldn’t want anyone to know either. Think how embarrassing it would be, after you live through this, to have them know you felt this way. They’d pity you, and nothing is worse than that.” She sits back in the chair, crosses her arms, and takes a deep breath.

  “When I was three or four years old,” she says, “my mother and father threw me away. Here’s how they did it. They bought me a piece of candy, one of those big round, hard lemon balls that you don’t chew, you suck on it, and then they tied a piece of brown string around my wrist, too tight to pull off, and tied the other end around part of a bus-stop bench—you know, the upright thing that separates the seat from the back. Then they went away.” She stops and licks her lips, quickly, and says, “I thought they’d come back. I was sure they’d come back. I’m not certain about this, but I think I invented a game. They’d be back when the lemon was gone. I know even now that the lemon lasted a long time, because I kept tasting it and tasting it and moving it from one cheek to another. I sucked it really hard, rolling it around in my mouth, waiting for it to get smaller and go away so they’d come back. And it got dark, and some buses stopped, and a lot of people came and went, and my parents weren’t with them, and then the candy was gone and the street was almost empty.”

  She puts one hand, with its chipped black fingernails, on the edge of the bed. “And I was crying, I guess, and leaning against the edge of the seat, because I wasn’t big enough to climb up on it. I couldn’t go anywhere, because, I mean, where would I have gone, and anyway I didn’t know how to untie a knot. So I couldn’t get up on the seat and I couldn’t run away, and a big soi dog, bigger than I was, came up to me and stopped and looked at me. Its tongue was hanging out, and it had all these teeth. Then it went down on its front legs with its butt in the air and jumped at me. I screamed and waved the hand I could wave, the one that wasn’t tied to the bench, but the dog went down again with its front legs spread out, and it jumped at me again. Now I know that’s how a dog plays. The dog probably had a kid at home, and that was how they played, but I thought it wanted to kill me. Eat me, I don’t know.” Miaow begins absently to scrape at the nail polish on her thumb. “So it kept trying to play, and I yelled at it and kicked it, and after a while it turned around and left. And I stood there, leaning against the bench and wishing it would come back.”

  There’s a rustle of bedclothes, and Treasure props herself up on one elbow.

  “So I wanted the dog to come back, I wanted the lemon candy to come back, and I wanted my parents to come back. It’s stupid that I wanted my parents to come back. My father slapped me a lot, one time so hard that my neck was sore for days. For years I only remembered two things about him, his loud voice and the way he slapped me that time. That was my father, that was everything I knew about my father. Two things. And then, when I was five or six and living on the street, I remembered one more thing about him. A man tried to catch me near Little India to . . . you know, do things to me, and he had been drinking whiskey. When I smelled that whiskey, I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life, because that smell was my father, and that’s who I was running away from. And I got away from the man, but I’ve never smelled whiskey since without my neck hurting. That’s how hard my father hit me. So that’s the third thing I know about my father, that he drank whiskey. Do you want to hear more?”

  It takes a full minute, maybe more, but Treasure says, “Yes.”

  “So I was . . . I was . . .” She scratches her head. “Right, I was tied to that bench, and the dog was gone. I don’t know how long I was there, since little kids don’t know how long things take, but it felt like a long, long time. I’d gotten cold. I was hungry. I’d wet myself—which made me even colder—I had snot all over my face, and a few people had walked by and looked down at me. I was ashamed to be tied to the bench, so I stood in front of the string, with my wrist behind me. So they wouldn’t know that I was so bad that my parents had thrown me away. I’d figured out by then that they weren’t coming back.”

  The door opens another half inch, as though someone has leaned against it, and then closes most of the way again. Anna and Chalee are still peeking around it. Neither Miaow nor Treasure seems to have registered it. “I was really tired of standing there, and I needed to try to sleep, but the string was too short for me to sit down on the sidewalk. If I sat, I had to hold my wrist in the air, which hurt after a while, and anyway it looked stupid. So I decided that everything would be all right if I could climb up onto the bench. Climbing on the bench would solve all my problems. If I could get up there, things would be fine. This must have been really late at night, because I don’t think the buses were still running. So I got up on tiptoe and got part of my tummy on the edge of the bench and just tried to . . . you know, jump a little and flop onto it like a fish, but—” Miaow suddenly smiles, and Rafferty—who feels like he’s hanging in space, listening to the story Miaow has never told him—realizes that she’s returning a smile from Treasure. “But every time I tried to push off with my feet, something, my clothes or my tummy or something, would snag, and I’d fall hard, onto my knees. Really hurts, your knees hitting concrete. After three or four times, I gave up and sat on the sidewalk crying, holding my stupid arm in the air until my hand got numb, and I began banging it against the concrete bench and feeling how it didn’t hurt, and then a boy came along, a few years older than I was, and he had a knife, and he cut the string and he took me away. That was Boo, by the way, the guy who runs this place now, that’s how we know him. Boo came and found me, and after that I lived with the kids he bossed around. I did anything he said until he got into yaa baa and went crazy. We stole things, we beat up rich kids, we took food from drunk bums. We cut some purses. When I was five or six, I got a knife of my own. I cut people with it a few times. I cut one man pretty bad, and if I had to, I’d do it again right now.”

  There’s a long silence in the room. Treasure has extended her neck toward Miaow so far that Rafferty can see her fine-boned profile through the frizz of hair that still has blood matted into it. He’s certain she no longer even knows he’s in the room.

  “So here’s what I’m saying,” Miaow says. “You’ve got friends here, and they’re really nice kids, my father worries about you all the time, and that deaf lady out there, the teacher, Anna? She’s crazy in love with you, and she’s with my father’s best friend, who’s a good man, and you can have a life. I have a life,” she says, wiping one cheek with her palm, “and if I can have a life, anybody can. You know, people don’t just throw love at you all the time. That’s not how it works.” She brushes her fingertips over her right eye, shaking her head. “They don’t come back over and over again, and there aren’t other people lined up behind them to throw more love at you. You have to say yes. You have to let them love you. Okay,” she says, getting up and sniffling. “That’s what I came to say. And oh, yeah, I hope we can be friends. That would make Poke happy.”

  She squares her shoulders and heads past Rafferty for the door, wiping her face in the crook of her arm, almost angrily. When she pulls the door open, Anna and Chalee back up fast, but then Anna stops and waits for Miaow to go through. Then she and Chalee come into the room. Rafferty catches the door as it closes and goes into the hall.

  Poke hears Miaow at the bottom of the stairs, moving quickly, but he stays where he is, a foot propping the door open, looking into the room. For what seems to him like quite a long time, Anna stands by the chair looking down at Treasure, and then she sits. After a few more minutes, Anna’s eyes slowly droop closed and her head falls onto her chest. Chalee, leaning back with one foot up against the wall, stares at Treasure, looking like someone trying to solve a puzzle. Then she sighs and goes to sit beside her on the bed.

  27

  Let Me See Your Teeth

  “You saw the way she was, the way she was lying there,” Miaow says as the hotel elevator doors close. Rafferty fig
ures they’ve got about thirty seconds alone before they get to their floor.

  “What about it?”

  “How small she was making herself.” Miaow is still working on the black nail polish. “What she wanted was to get smaller and smaller until she was like . . . I don’t know, a seed. And then pop, just disappear.”

  Rafferty is looking at the top of her head as she worries at the nail polish. Compelled by sheer opportunity, he leans over and tousles her hair, which she immediately pats back into place. He says, “Why don’t you part it in the middle again?”

  Brushing it out of her face, she says, “Same reason you don’t shave all yours off and grow a long beard. It looks stupid.”

  The bell on the other side of the door chimes softly to announce their arrival. He says, “I think you helped her.”

  “I don’t know,” Miaow says, heading into the corridor. “Nobody can help anybody who doesn’t want help.”

  It’s almost nine by the time he leaves Miaow and Rose to their evening stiff-upper-lip marathon, using the hotel’s DVD player. On the way up Patpong, squinting through the drizzle and failing to spot his watcher, he ducks into the Expat Bar, where he finds only Leon, Campeau, and Toots in residence.

  “It is early still,” Hofstedler says a bit huffily, as though Rafferty’s “Where is everybody?” had been a criticism. “Our friends here, they have lives, you know.”

  Rafferty says, “I’m sure they do,”

  Hofstedler nods acceptance of Rafferty’s contrition and glances down at his watch. “This is Tuesday,” he announces to the room, as though he suspects they haven’t been keeping up. “Miaow’s play is Friday, yes?”

  “It is. I watched the rehearsal today. It’ll be good.”

  “I am coming, Pinky is coming, Louis is coming.” It takes Rafferty a moment before he realizes that Louis is the Growing Younger man. “The one with the hair is coming,” Leon concludes.

  “Ron,” Campeau says. “His name is Ron. Am I invited?”

  “Of course you’re invited, Bob,” Rafferty says, wondering what will happen when Rose sees him. “Wouldn’t be a first night without you.”

  Campeau says, “Should I dress up?”

  Rafferty says, “I’m going to wear a clean shirt.”

  “Wow,” Campeau says. “Semiformal.”

  “We’ve got, what, two, three days?” Rafferty says. “We can talk more about it later. Leon, did you keep your eyes open getting here?”

  “There was a man looking at me,” Hofstedler says. “The street was not yet crowded, so even I could see him.”

  “Even you?”

  “Wallace tells me that I do not notice things.”

  “Well,” Rafferty says, “compared to Wallace . . .”

  “He is not so good tonight, Wallace,” Hofstedler says. “In fact, he is very bad. When I knock on his door? First he does not answer, and then he calls me Ernie, through the door. Several times he calls me Ernie. I invite him to Miaow’s play, and he does not reply. I knock several more times, substantially. I say, ‘I come to take you to the bar,’ and he says, ‘I have a date.’” Hofstedler has hoisted his beer, but he puts it down in order to spread his hands as though to say, What can you do? “It is a bad night, I think.”

  “He’s seemed . . .” Rafferty searches for an accurate word, and the one he comes up with seems sadly insufficient. “Better lately.”

  Toots says, “Sometime good, sometime no good.”

  “It is like the tide,” Hofstedler says, wiping foam from his lip. “It comes in and then it goes out.”

  “Except,” Campeau says, “it goes out a little farther every time.”

  Looking up at him, Hofstedler says, “This is all of us, yes, Bob?”

  The RiffRaff is dank with steam from the kitchen and loud with the voices of men who are already well into their evening’s quota of beer. Here and there a bar girl twinkles like a rhinestone, sitting beside the man who paid her bar fine. Some of them are working the job: listening, laughing, looking appreciative, keeping the current flowing with occasional touches on the man’s arm or the back of his hand. Others sit passively, just waiting for the next stage of the transaction.

  One of his favorite waitresses holds up two fingers for Two minutes and inclines her head toward Rafferty’s usual booth in the window, where three heavyset Western men, one of them black, are examining their money as though it were Kleenex and sliding the check from hand to hand. The African-American guy finally takes charge, squinting at the bills with the king’s face on them as he counts them out. When he’s got a loose pile on top of the check, he shrugs, and all three of them get up. On the way out, one of them, looking over his shoulder at a woman in the corner, bumps into the waitress. When Rafferty turns, curious about who the man was looking at, he sees that it’s Lutanh, who’s making adoring moon eyes at her customer. When she feels Poke’s gaze, she puts her hand to her forehead and, from behind it, winks at him.

  He sits while the table is still wet and orders some noodles with pork, basil, and chili, plus a small Singha. Still vibrating from the story that Miaow told Treasure, he’s staring at the table as it dries and wondering whether she’s shared it with Rose. The thought is broken when the waitress arrives and plunks down an oversize bottle of beer.

  Rafferty starts to protest, and she says, “Big one. On the house because we don’t see you too much and we want you come back. Boss think we give you free beer, you come back fast.”

  He says, “He figured me out.” His attention is drawn by movement behind her, a Western guy with a shaved head, dressed entirely in black, who is escorting not one but two bar workers, one of whom—the older of the pair, by ten years or so—looks vaguely familiar. The man wears glasses with circular black lenses, the design of which owes a great deal to the old film The Matrix. Add it all up, Rafferty thinks, and it’s a pathetic portrait of Homo westernus in Bangkok: shaving his head because he’s balding and wearing black because he thinks it makes him look thinner, all to appeal to women whose only worry about his age would be that he might die on top of them and to whom the thickness of his midsection takes a distant second place in importance to the thickness of his wallet. And the poor clown is topping it off with a pair of shades that were mildly hip, in a derivative way, maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago.

  The man in black waves the two women to an empty table and does a peremptory little back-and-forth with his hand, index finger pointing at the women as he looks at the waitress, meaning Give them whatever they want. All pretty lordly, not likely to make friends. The man’s upper lip looks a yard long.

  Rafferty’s lost in the tabletop again when the man in black slides into the seat opposite. He takes off the glasses to reveal bright blue eyes and says, as though continuing an interrupted conversation, “There’s an informal interrogator’s code about getting the information you need.” He holds up a hand, palm out. “Stop me if you’re already an expert in all this.”

  “No wonder you were wearing that dumb mustache,” Rafferty says, trying to get his heartbeat under control. “I thought it was to make your teeth look white, but it wasn’t. It was because you’ve got enough skin on your upper lip to make a pair of gloves.”

  Varney nods acknowledgment that Rafferty has spoken and ignores what he said. “So the first thing you have to do is get the subject’s attention. Normally you do that by putting him or her in the room. The room is a great attention getter. You know which decorator touch makes for a great interrogation room?”

  “You’ve actually forgotten the real first step—” Rafferty begins.

  “A drain in the middle of the floor,” Varney says. He’s got his left hand flat on the table and the right is down, out of sight, which gives Rafferty a cold, sloshy feeling in his lower belly. “Raises all sorts of imaginative possibilities, that drain does. Why do they need that? What gets hosed down that thing?” He s
hakes his head as Rafferty begins to speak again. “I know, you’ve got a lot to say, but I have an agenda in mind, and I won’t be here long. Nice-looking girls, aren’t they? One of them anyway. The things bar girls learn to do—but hey, why am I telling you that? You’re the expert.”

  Rafferty keeps his face blank while mentally running through four or five ways to kill him. The anger actually calms him.

  “Aaaahhh, I’m sorry,” Varney says, showing his big, square teeth in a grin. “Not worthy of me. Just a little payback for those things you said about the way I look, my teeth and all that. Let me see your teeth.”

  Rafferty says, “Fuck you.”

  “Let me see your teeth,” Varney says again, in exactly the same tone. “And if you’re asking yourself why you should, just look to your left, out through the nice window until you see Kiet. You’ll recognize him. He’s got that awful-looking long coat on, and he’s been glued to your shoes whenever you were in the neighborhood. See him?”

  Rafferty says, “I do.” He has seen him before. In the glass he can also see Varney’s reflection, and he watches Varney make a gesture like someone opening a door. Kiet obediently tugs the long coat aside for just a moment, showing Rafferty a short automatic rifle, probably an MP5 submachine gun. Then the coat swoops closed and the man gives him a big smile.

  “He can take out this window and half the people in here, including that waitress you seem to like so much, in about three seconds and be up at Surawong and behind the motorcycle driver who’s waiting for him while people out there are still looking for the bomb. And while he’s firing, I’ll use the gun in my right hand, the one down here”—he raps his knuckles on the table—“to blow your kneecap to pieces. Unless I miss and hit you in the balls. Show me your teeth.”

  Rafferty bares his teeth, fighting the impulse to lean over and bite off the man’s nose.