A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  By the time he finished the book, he was also finished with Patpong. He'd asked his questions, gotten his answers, written his chapters, and departed from professional objectivity to take home more dancers than he can comfortably remember. He knows now how the machine works, knows how coldhearted are the mathematics behind the smiles. Whatever tawdry allure the street may have possessed has evaporated.

  On the other hand, he'd met both Rose and Miaow here, so he feels he owes the street something. He can't bring himself to hate it with the same intensity Rose does, but like her he has used the street up. His heart now is entirely with her and Miaow, the family he has cobbled together with a former go-go dancer and a child selling chewing gum from a box, one of the heartbreaking legion of sidewalk sparrows who haunt the Bangkok night. Slowly, by keeping faith with them, by making promises carefully and meeting them, he has begun to make it work.

  Miaow does not trust easily. In her short lifetime, she has been betrayed, abandoned, cheated, and probably abused in ways he has never dared to ask about. Even with Rose's help, it has taken him months to win her confidence. He has given her much, while she has asked for nothing.

  Cartier, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Armani: watches, purses, blouses, scarves, all of them lacking the only accurate label: "Fraudulent." Stale sweat, cheap perfume, cigarette smoke. Frying garlic. The thunk of big-hair eighties rock and roll from the bars. A bottle hitting the pavement. He picks his way between the bright lights of the Patpong night market without registering the glitter of the jewelry and sunglasses, the colors of the textiles, the sweating crowd, or the broken-record calls of the touts pushing Ping-Pong shows, razor-blade shows, and other improbable vaginal feats.

  The boy can't stay with them.

  Two children will be noticed and misinterpreted, perhaps officially. At this moment, with Rafferty on the verge of making the moves that will legalize the bonds among him, Rose, and Miaow, that kind of trouble would be unendurable. If he succeeds, they will legally be a family. If he fails, he will have lost the center of his life. He can't let that happen.

  But Miaow has finally asked Rafferty to do something for her. On one level, he supposes, it's good news. She has developed enough faith in him to ask the impossible.

  So what does he do? Think short-term: Get rid of the boy's scabies.

  Rafferty is edging his way toward one particular stall when he turns at the sound of his name being mispronounced.

  "Poque." The voice, a theatrical basso profundo, belongs to an elephantine man in a flowery shirt as big as a fumigation tent. He somehow manages to insinuate several redundant European vowels into the single syllable of Rafferty's first name. "A word or two?"

  "Leon," Rafferty says. On the very long list of people he would rather not see right now, Leon Hofstedler occupies the top position. "Is the bar on fire? Are they renovating your stool?"

  "American humor is the envy of the world," Hofstedler says solemnly.

  Hofstedler imagines himself as the heart of a small group of permanent sex tourists-Rafferty thinks of them as "sexpatriots"-who spend most of their waking hours in the eternal twilight of the Expat Bar on Patpong 1, solemnly swapping lies and denying that they buy Viagra in bulk. The bar is probably the only place in Thailand where the television has been unplugged to avoid the endless repetition of the huge waves sweeping away so much of the south. Mass death dampens the patrons' libidos.

  "That's six or seven words already, Leon." Rafferty resists the urge to shift from foot to foot. "I'm kind of on an errand here."

  "Ze beautiful Rose." Hofstedler puckers his lips for a whistle and then, wisely, thinks better of it. "I would be busy, too, if I were so lucky as you. But zis-this-is about someone substantially less alluring."

  "Everyone's less alluring, Leon. But who specifically?"

  "You are being sought." Hofstedler's voice drops an impossible octave. He occasionally claims to have spent his youth carrying a spear in some of the world's longest and murkiest operas, and he retains an impressive bass range and a Wagnerian sense of drama. "Sought," he repeats, "by a woman of mystery."

  "Okay," Rafferty says.

  If Hofstedler is disappointed that Poke fails to clutch his chest and stagger backward, he doesn't show it. "She does not wish you to know you are being sought."

  "Well, closing right in," Rafferty says, glancing at his watch. "Thai? Farang? Japanese? Eurotrash?"

  "Australian," Hofstedler says, sounding dissatisfied with Rafferty's reaction for the first time.

  "I don't know any Strines," Rafferty says. "I mean, not of the fair sex, so to speak. Just out of curiosity, how fair?"

  "Not so very," Hofstedler says with a connoisseur's confidence. "In her thirties, I would say, the most tragic period in a woman's life…"

  "I know, Leon. The decade of decline, and all that." Like most of his circle, Hoftstedler expends his enthusiasm exclusively on bar girls in their late teens and very early twenties. "So, anything that might help me identify her other than the ravages of time? You know-hair, height, weight?"

  Hofstedler's mouth contracts around something sour. "Plump, blondish, frizzy all over. Not happy. She smelled of angst."

  "I've got all the angst I need at the moment. And I really have to get moving."

  "She comes in the bar several times," Hofstedler plows on. "And always she sits beside me and drinks many glasses of tomato juice." He shudders as though the drink had contained eye of newt.

  "Leon," Rafferty says, "life is short."

  Hofstedler waves it off. "So we talked. She wants to know how long I am here, who my friends are. And always she keeps coming to you, Poke. 'Do you have any artist friends?' she asks. 'What about writers?' she says. 'Do you know any writers?' So naturally I tell her about you, and she says she knows your name, that she has read all your books."

  "A woman of taste and discretion," Rafferty says.

  "But as interesting as you are, Poke, you are not enough to keep a conversation alive." Hofstedler nods energetically, agreeing with himself. "So I attempt to move on, but always she comes back to you. Where does he live, Poke Rafferty? Is it true that he sometimes helps people find other people?"

  Rafferty resists an impulse to spit on the sidewalk. "And I hope you said it wasn't."

  "Naturally, I reminded her that you were only a writer. But it seems she read the little thing you wrote for that throwaway."

  "'Going Native,'" Rafferty says between his teeth. "I never would have written the goddamn thing if I'd known anyone would read it."

  "And, of course, one presumes you were paid something."

  "One may presume what one likes."

  "Still," Hofstedler says grudgingly, "I have to admit, it was tidy, the way you found those men."

  "Leon. A thousand guys a year go missing in Thailand because they want to. A Cub Scout could find them. There's probably even someone who wonders where you are."

  "She certainly does," Hofstedler says.

  "So anyway, this woman in the bar is taking time out from the decade of tragic decline to ask about me."

  "Yes, this is the refrain: When do you come into the bar? She asks several times, when do you come into the bar? I say I have no idea, but I will be happy to tell you she is seeking you." Hofstedler simulates a smile to demonstrate how happy he would have been. "And she says, 'Oh, no, no. I'm not looking for him. I was just curious, that's all.'"

  "Golly," Rafferty says, "maybe that was all."

  "No," Hofstedler says. "She was lying." His eyelids drop to an eloquent half-mast that owes much to the early Lauren Bacall. "Regard this." He slips fat fingers into the pocket of his shirt. "She smoked, did I say that? And when she went to the bathroom, I discovered I also wanted a cigarette, so I borrowed one of hers and used these."

  Rafferty would not be surprised if Hoftstedler's hand came out of the pocket holding a half-eaten pork chop, but instead it is a book of matches. He gives it a little magician's flourish and then hands it to Poke. On the outside it says
CHAMPION SNOOKER, with an address in Sydney. Rafferty opens it and finds himself looking at a very neat, formally uniform handwriting that says "Expat Bar, Patpong," and, below that, "Poke Rafferty."

  For a moment Rafferty thinks he recognizes the handwriting, but then it eludes him and it looks like it could belong to anyone.

  In the gathering dusk, the early shoppers flock to the stalls of the street vendors, adding the vigorous push and pull of capitalism to the similar but more primitive dynamics of sex.

  "Sweatpants and shirt," Rafferty says in Thai. "Blue, child's size ten. And a couple of pairs of underpants."

  "For you, special price," the woman says automatically. Then her eyes reach Rafferty's face, and she reaches out and slaps his forearm, quite hard. "Khun Poke," she says, smiling broadly. "I give you number one deal." Tik is speaking Thaiglish, the official language of Patpong. "How's the baby? She's size ten already? Big, na?"

  "They're not for her, Tik," Rafferty says. "They're for a friend of hers. Another street kid."

  Tik gives him a knowing nod. "Be careful with your heart. They look different when they're clean." Her eyes drop to the clothes in front of her, and for a moment her mouth goes slack and she stands perfectly still, as though she has forgotten he is there.

  "Tik?" Her gaze comes up and skids past him, avoiding the contact. "Are you okay, Tik?" He asks the inevitable question: "Did you have family or friends down there?" "Down there" means only one thing in Thailand now.

  "Sister's son," she says, finally meeting his eyes. Rafferty registers the smudged-ash rings beneath her eyes and the lines around her mouth. "Him, him…" She squints toward the term. "Him beach boy. Bring chair for farang, sell cola, sell cigarette." She blinks several times and looks down again, then busies herself straightening a plumb-straight stack of T-shirts.

  "How old?"

  "Seventeen. Good boy. Go school. Sometimes." She is curling her fingers into a tight fist, crumpling the T-shirt on top of the stack.

  Rafferty touches the back of her hand, and the muscles in her arm jump, but she relaxes her hand. "I'm so sorry."

  "Not only me," she says. "Everybody. All same-same. Have brother, sister, mama, papa. Everybody."

  Rose had a friend working the bars on Patong Beach in Phuket, swept away now with dozens of other night flowers, leaving impoverished families grieving on the thin-dirt farms of the northeast. "How's your sister doing?"

  "How doing? She working, same everyone." She tilts her chin toward a stall across the way that sells enormous spiders and scorpions preserved under glass. A woman sits in front of it, hands cupped in her lap as though she is trying to hold water. "We lucky," she says. "They find him. Can take him to temple, let him rest. Now so many ghosts down there, people nobody find."

  "That's the worst part," Rafferty says.

  She shakes her head. "Hungry ghosts. Very terrible."

  The Thais share the world with a whole pantheon of ghosts, a taxonomy of the dead, and not only in the less-cosmopolitan villages. The prime minister's official residence is said to be so haunted that no one spends the night there. The new Suvarnabhumi airport, not even complete yet, is crowded with spirits. But hungry ghosts-people who died suddenly, sundered from their lives without any kind of grace or completion-are the most horrifying. Incapable of rest, they wander the world on winds of rage, eating life where they find it, unable either to return to the lives that were stolen from them or to move on. Rose fears them completely and uncritically, just one of the many ways in which she and Rafferty, despite all their efforts, inhabit different worlds.

  "I'm sorry, Tik," Rafferty says again. The words are so insufficient he is not even sure they reach her. "There's not much anybody can do."

  "They can live," Tik says. Then she says, in Thai, "Life is a gift. If we don't live it well, we are being ungrateful. And we have to love the ones who journey with us." She leans her head to the left and then snaps it to the right, cracking the vertebrae in her neck. Rafferty has seen Thais do it many times, but every time he tries it, he feels like he has dislocated his head. Tik shakes her head experimentally and blows out a breath. "Boy or girl?"

  "Sorry?"

  "The child. Miaow's friend." She has her business face on, willing away tragedy. This is another thing Thais have that Rafferty doesn't, this genius for inhabiting the present moment.

  "Boy."

  "Size ten, blue, na?" As fast as a gambler's shuffle, she flips through the clothes and comes up with two garments.

  Rafferty glances at them and visualizes the filthy rags they will replace. "How long have you been on this street, Tik?"

  She pauses halfway through slipping the clothes into a plastic bag and narrows her eyes. "Four…no, five years. Why?"

  "Maybe you know the kid."

  She shrugs. "Many kids. Now even more." Her eyes go past him and settle on something, and Rafferty half turns to see what it is. "You very handsome tonight," Tik says.

  "Clean living. What were you looking at?"

  "She gone now."

  He turns to survey the street. "Who?"

  "Lady," Tik says. "Farang lady. She look at you and look at you. Because you so handsome. You almost look Thai."

  Rafferty, whose straight black hair and smooth features mirror his mother's, knows this is a high compliment. "What did she look like?"

  Tik shakes her head. "Not so good. Too fat, na? Too fat, yellow hair, big nose."

  Hofstedler's mystery woman. "All farang have big noses."

  "This is why you good-looking," Tik says. "You almost got Asian nose. Also, black hair and eyes. Right color, very nice."

  Rafferty turns to scan the crowd behind him. "And she went where?"

  "Toward Superstar Bar. She go fast when you turn around."

  "Life is more interesting than I'd like it to be," Rafferty says. "So the kid. He's ten or eleven, real skinny. Got hair that looks like a hundred people spent a year tying knots in it."

  Tik's mouth widens in distaste. "Not know." She shakes her head and extends her hand to give him the bag. Her eyes fall on the fold of the sweatshirt and then come up to Rafferty's. There is a crease between her eyebrows. "Blue?" she says. She shakes the bag as though the child is in it. "He wear blue?"

  "Blue as the sky, but dirtier. Head to…um-What in the world is wrong?"

  Tik has stepped back, shaking her head vigorously. "Thin, na? Blue clothes. Here, on the front-" She sketches a loosely shaped zigzag on her chest.

  "That's him," Rafferty says.

  "No." She holds out the bag to him as though he has something communicable, not meeting his eyes.

  "What do you mean, no?"

  "No. Just no." Her arm remains stretched out, her hand clutching the bag, forgotten.

  "Can you be a little more specific?"

  "This boy. No good. Him…him…" She extends her right hand, index finger pointing like the barrel of a pistol, and lets her thumb drop. "Bang, bang," she says. Then she says, "Him kill."

  5

  Then We'll Start to Ask Him Questions

  The guard's head breaks the surface, spouting pints of muddy water. His jaws have been clamped open with a stainless-steel device designed for root canals. When it was forced into the guard's mouth, it dislocated his jaw, which sags to the side like something in a funhouse mirror.

  The largest of the three shirtless men ringing the hole in the lawn puts a hand the size of a badminton racket on top of the guard's head and pushes him back under.

  One of the other men laughs.

  "I'm glad you find this amusing," says the lady of the house, and the laughter stops as suddenly as though someone had shut a door on it.

  The guard surfaces again, and the big man slams him on top of the head with the broad side of a brick. Red brick dust settles on the surface of the water. His arms flailing, the guard tries to get a grip on the grass fringing the hole, but the man who laughed puts the edge of his boot heel on the closest hand and grinds down. Whatever it is the guard is trying to say
, the dental appliance turns it into one long, agonized vowel.

  The biggest man picks up the garden hose that they have used to fill the hole and wields it like a whip, the metal at its tip opening cuts in the guard's scalp and face. Water spouts out of the hose in lazy arcs, sparkling in the late-afternoon sun. The guard goes underwater, this time on his own, trying to dodge the hose, and the man lashes at the surface of the water, splashing the thick liquid everywhere.

  The lady of the house moves her chair back so she will not get mud on her shoes. She says, "Give him another drink."

  When the guard surfaces again, one of the men grabs his ears, tilting his face up, and the big man thrusts the end of the hose into the guard's mouth and six or eight inches straight down his throat. Then he pinches the guard's nostrils closed. The guard begins to spasm, thrashing, striking out with his arms, spouting water like a fountain. After ten or fifteen seconds, the big man pulls the hose out, and a spurt of water gives way to a ragged howl loud enough and high enough to lift the birds from the trees and send them skimming over the placid, coffee-colored surface of the river.

  "Two more times," says the lady of the house, settling herself in her chair to watch the hose snake once again into the wide mouth. "Or maybe three."

  The scream is cut off as abruptly as it started. "Then we'll start to ask him questions," she says.

  6

  A Cool Heart

  Silhouetted against the setting sun, Miaow squats on the little balcony overlooking the Chinese cemetery eight floors below, staring a hole in the fire as she feeds the blue flames their blue fuel. The sleeve of Superman's filthy sweatshirt hangs over the side of Rafferty's rusty hibachi. A fine edge of flame licks its way down. With a long-handled barbecue fork, Miaow spears the sleeve, lifts it, and drops it into the center of the flames, raising a small puff of smoke and ash. The sliding glass door between the balcony and the living room is open, and Bangkok's March heat and the throat-scratching smell of burning cloth fill the room.