A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "I sold flowers every day for almost two years," she says. She is looking straight in front of her, seeing her own life unspool like a film. "Boo was always there. One night a man called me to come to his car. When I got there, he reached out and grabbed my arm. He tried to pull me into the car, right through the window. Like a bag of rice. Boo ran up and bit the man's arm. He wouldn't let go. The man dropped me and drove off, with Boo hanging from his arm, biting him deeper and deeper. We were running behind, screaming for the man to stop. The man was screaming, too. When Boo let go, he fell on the road. He got up with blood all over his face and shirt and on his elbows and knees from where he fell. He was laughing."

  "Fierce heart," Rose says.

  Miaow falls silent. Rafferty can see her struggling with the next words. Rose pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse, looks at it, and drops it back in.

  "Then some bigger boys showed him about yaa baa." Yaa baa is a cheap, potent variant on amphetamine that is widely sold on the streets of Southeast Asia. "Then he wasn't Boo anymore. People who smoke yaa baa don't want to eat, so he stopped helping us find food. He got mad all the time. If you smiled at him wrong, he got mad. He hit one of the girls so hard her nose broke. He was sorry later, but we were already afraid of him. One of the kids left, and then another one. After a while it was just me.

  "He smoked it every morning. He smoked it all day. His hands shook. He screamed at people who didn't buy a garland. Drivers closed their windows when he came up to them, and he spit on the windows. The police got him, and I didn't see him for two weeks. When he came back from the monkey house, he took away the money I had made so he could buy yaa baa. I gave him the money when he asked, but he hit me anyway. Two days later he came again, and this time he cried and said he was sorry. He said he wasn't going to smoke anymore. The next time I saw him, he was so crazy he didn't know me."

  "He was how old then?" Rafferty asks.

  "A year before I met you," she says, working it out. "I was about seven. He was maybe nine or ten."

  Rafferty blows out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Miaow," he says, "yaa baa is cheap, but if he was smoking so much, he had to have money. Where did-"

  She stops him by raising the hand with the T-shirt in it, sees it, and drops it into her lap. "I'm telling you." She squares her shoulders like someone who is about to pick up something heavy and sits forward.

  "He joined a bunch of boys. They stole things. They smoked and ate pills and stole things. Maybe from a food vendor or even a beggar. Sometimes they beat people up. Ten or twelve boys, who would fight them? They were bigger than Boo, but he was smarter. So he had an idea. Those men-those men who want little boys. Before, they were around Soi 8, Soi 6, you know?"

  "I know," Rafferty says.

  "So one of the boys would pretend he was going with the man and leave the door unlocked, and the others would all come into the room and hurt the man and take his money." She looks from Rose to Rafferty. "That was when they started to call him Superman. Then I stopped hearing about him."

  "What happened to him?" Rafferty asks.

  "He told me last night he went to Phuket." Her eyes come up to Rafferty's, as if assessing the impact of what she is about to say. "Phuket is full of boys."

  It's not Pattaya, Rafferty knows, but it's bad enough. "What brought him back to Bangkok? The wave?"

  "He won't tell me," Miaow says. "But he said it was worse than the wave."

  Rose gets up and crowds onto the couch beside Miaow and wraps her in dark, slender arms. Rafferty wants to hug her himself. She could have stopped long minutes ago, with the rescue from the man in the car. She could have left the boy a hero. She didn't have to talk about the drugs. He knows what she wants, and she knows that every word she speaks makes it harder for him to say yes.

  Miaow gently disengages herself and takes Rafferty's hand in her right and Rose's in her left. "After it happened, Boo ran back to Bangkok. He's too old to beg now. He sleeps in the street. He says he hasn't smoked any yaa baa in a long time." She stops, breathing heavily, as though she's just run up the stairs. She wraps her fingers around Rafferty's thumb, gripping hard. "I want him to stay with us."

  "Oh, Miaow," Rafferty says, although he knew it was coming.

  "He can sleep in my room," Miaow says, talking faster. Her hands are tight fists around theirs. "I'll sleep on the floor. He can have half my allowance. He doesn't eat much. He can wear my extra shoes. You already bought him a pair of pants and a shirt. I'll make him stay in the other room, out of your way, when you're home. He can help Rose." She has squeezed her eyes shut with the effort of dredging up argument after argument and also, Rafferty thinks, because she is afraid to look at his face. He presses her hand to stop the flow.

  "He can fix the faucet," she says. "You always say you'll fix it, but you never do. He can get that spot out of the carpet. He can-"

  Rose says, "Miaow, did he tell you to ask Poke if he could stay with us?"

  Miaow's eyes open. She looks surprised. "No," she says. "I don't even know if he will."

  "It's just not a good idea, Miaow," Rafferty says. "I'll try to find someplace else for him."

  She drums her feet against the sofa in frustration. "That will take weeks. And he won't stay there. He needs to be here." She looks at Rafferty with an expression he has never seen on her face before. "He needs me." She brings her hands up, head high, in a prayerlike wai of supplication. "This time he needs me."

  Rafferty looks at Rose, and Rose looks at Rafferty. Rose closes her eyes, seceding from the discussion. Rafferty sits back, feeling the "No" rise up in him. And then he sees Miaow being lifted through the window of a car.

  "Not for long," he says. "One week, two weeks. Until he feels better and we can find a place for him to stay."

  "Really?" Miaow's eyes fill half her face.

  "Go get him," Rafferty says. "Let's see if we can talk him into it."

  13

  Nickname Doughnut

  Mr. Ulrich used us both times," the lady behind the desk at Bangkok Domestics says in crisp English.

  She is in her forties, clinging grimly to twenty-eight. Her face is white with powder, and her hair has been dyed blacker than a crow's wing and lacquered into a rigid little wave in front that would probably shatter if touched. Her uniform is a frilly lavender junior-miss business suit that sports buttons the size of the door-knobs. It looks like something a small girl would wear on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

  The wall behind her is a panorama of past glory. The anxious woman sitting at the desk is pictured in happier times with some of Bangkok's most media-hungry socialites, faded snap after faded snap attesting to a once-thriving concern, supplying domestic help to the wives of the rich and-given the topsy-turvy world of Thai politics-the occasionally powerful.

  But now she sits behind a scratched wooden desk in a room barely big enough to exhale into. On the desk, facing Rafferty, is a file, topped by an official-looking form adorned with many impressive seals. One of them, Rafferty notices, is a United States Boy Scouts seal. In the blank for NAME, he reads: Miss Tippawan Dangphai.

  "Doughnut," Rafferty says. "Any idea why Doughnut?"

  The woman barely shrugs. "Who knows? We have one girl nicknamed Pogo and two who call themselves Banana. Several years back we had one named Aspirin. Girls," she says, as though this explains everything, which it probably does.

  A passport-size black-and-white photo has been stapled to the form, next to a blank space where a fingerprint should be. Despite the frivolous nickname, Doughnut is not a particularly blithe-looking girl. She faces the camera glumly, with the attitude of one who knows the picture will not come out. The camera has been kind to the large, beautiful eyes, but it has muddied the dark skin of Isaan, in the northeast. Aside from the eyes, she is not a striking woman. Her face is as wide as it is long, her lower lip too full, and her nose has virtually no bridge to it. It is a face Rafferty sees everywhere in Bangkok, the face of refugees from Isaan's broken vi
llages and barren farms and no rain. On the basis of the photo, Doughnut would be difficult to pick out of a lineup.

  "So the first maid stayed with him for ten years?"

  "Or more." She makes a patient show of checking a piece of paper in front of her. "Ten years and seven months."

  "And then he called you for a replacement."

  "Nine weeks ago." She pauses. "As I said."

  He feels a flare of irritation. "So you did. And, as I said a minute ago, the man's disappeared, and so has the maid. The maid you selected for him." He sits back, watching her, and then puts out an index finger to move the Bangkok Domestics business card he took from Claus Ulrich's desk. "The maid whose fingerprint you forgot to get."

  She straightens, and laces her fingers together on the desk. "Surely there's no question that the maid had anything to do with it."

  "Isn't there? Do you know where she is? Has she called to say she's available for work again?"

  The air-conditioning unit kicks out for a moment and then kicks in with a depressed hum, something it does every forty seconds or so. However thriving it may once have been, the present Bangkok Domestics is a one-room operation, housed in a deteriorating four-story walk-up in the Pratunam area of the city. If the firm is profitable these days, it is saving a fortune on office space.

  "Has she?" Rafferty asks again, since the woman has apparently slipped into a meditative trance, staring down at her file.

  "No," she says, without looking up. A furrow appears between her eyebrows, and a fine snow of face powder sifts down toward her lap.

  "Right," Rafferty says. "Tell me what the police will say. A missing farang, a missing Thai maid, who cleaned out her room before she left. A farang woman who's come to Bangkok to try to find him. Tell me what the police will say."

  "The police are not involved," she says, tidying the piles of paper on her desk.

  "Not officially," Rafferty says. He holds up his cell phone. "But perhaps they could be helpful." The woman blinks twice. He begins to dial.

  She tells him what he wants to know.

  What Claus Ulrich requested-what he had requested both times from Bangkok Domestics-was a relatively young woman, in her early twenties, who could cook and clean and who had at least one strong reference.

  "And she had a reference?" Rafferty asks.

  A hesitation. The woman's eyes drop to the file again but don't focus on it. "Yes."

  "I want to talk to the reference."

  "Oh, no," the woman says immediately. "Out of the question."

  "Not really," Rafferty says. "Not when you think about it."

  She pushes her chair back from the desk very quickly, as though there might be a snake beneath it. "Please, no. This woman is a very good customer. Also-how can I put this? — she is not someone I would want to make angry. She is formidable." The French pronunciation.

  "She'll get over it."

  The chair is already pressed against the wall so she can go no farther, but she flutters her hands at him, making him feel like a bird she is trying to shoo out a window. "Please, let me explain. There are people you meet who, you know at once, will make a good friend. I'm sure this has happened to you. And then, much more rarely, there are people who you know immediately will make a bad enemy." The fluttering turns into a fanning gesture, as though her face is hot. "A very bad enemy."

  "This is a woman you met on the phone," Rafferty says, "not on a battlefield."

  "I was called to her house," the woman says, as though this will make it all clear. "I spent time with her. She is…" She searches the air above Rafferty's head, looking for the words. "She is not easily forgettable."

  "Well, I'm sorry, because I'm going to have to talk to her. In fact, I need a photocopy of the reference she wrote."

  "This is very bad." She is fanning herself again.

  Rafferty smiles at her reassuringly. "Oh, come on. What can she do to you?"

  "I don't want to know," the woman says.

  Three minutes and one more mention of the police later, he has a copy of the letter of reference and a pair of fuchsia-colored sticky notes with Doughnut's address and the number for the sole telephone in the village she left behind. Halfway to the door, he turns back.

  "It might be a good idea to talk to Ulrich's first maid, too."

  A pause, during which the woman seems to be framing her reply. "She's dead," she says at last. "Motorbike accident. That's why he needed a new one."

  Rafferty takes another look at the cramped little office. "Where do your girls come from?"

  She blinks surprise at the question. "The northeast, mostly."

  "Do you have any former go-go girls working for you?"

  The heavily powdered upper lip rises a scornful quarter of an inch. Compared to the dead white of the powder, her teeth are yellow. "Of course not."

  "Why not?"

  "They're liars and thieves, every one of them. Liars and thieves."

  "Really," Rafferty says, thinking of Rose's roomful of scrubbed hopefuls and then the scrubbed room Doughnut had left behind. "We couldn't have that, could we?"

  14

  The Only People in Bangkok More Dangerous Than the Crooks

  The maid's address is the Bangkok Bank Building," Rafferty says into the cell phone. He has ducked into the bank's deep doorway to escape the setting sun's final attempt to incinerate the city before giving up for the night.

  "Maybe she sleeps with her money," Arthit says.

  "And the telephone number is not in service."

  "Careful girl." Arthit covers the mouthpiece and says something to someone else. "I'm back," he says. "Maybe she was planning to steal something and disappear."

  "And maybe she got caught," Rafferty says. "And overreacted."

  "And maybe it has nothing to do with anything. Maybe she was living on the street. By the way, thanks for the photo. I faxed it down there and asked a couple of guys to check the hospitals and compare it with the boards." The "boards," at least one in every community struck by the tsunami, display the photos of corpses that have washed ashore. A crowd gathers to study them each morning, all hoping to find, and hoping not to find, someone they love.

  "So I don't have to go down?" He tries to keep the relief out of his voice. It is after five o'clock now, and it has been a long day: the meeting with Clarissa Ulrich, Uncle Claus's apartment and the Expat Bar, the scene with Miaow. The sneer from the woman at Bangkok Domestics.

  "Probably not. There's no Ulrich on the hospital lists, although it could be that he's unconscious and didn't have any ID. The picture will help there. He's not on the computers of any of the hotels whose computers weren't destroyed."

  "Your guys ought to show the picture to the people from the other hotels."

  "Really." Arthit sounds like he's rolling the word uphill. "We never would have thought of that. Where there are people from the other hotels, they'll talk to them."

  "This guy is not a beach bunny, Arthit. He weighs three hundred pounds, and according to Clarissa, he burns faster than bacon. And you should see the apartment; it looks like he roomed with Ludwig of Bavaria. No one with taste like that goes outdoors if he can help it. And the only thing I can see him doing with a coconut palm is eating it."

  "So what's your guess?"

  "I think it has something to do with the maid. Her name is Tippawan Dangphai."

  "Dangphai," Arthit says with the tone-deaf inflection of someone who is writing and talking at the same time. "Nickname?" All Thais have nicknames, a necessity in a country where a name can have six to eight syllables.

  "Doughnut."

  Arthit sighs. "Sometimes I think we Thais carry this merriment thing too far. I'll run the full name through the databases." He clears his throat, usually a sign he has something to say and he's not happy about it. "Poke, I'm afraid Clarissa did something stupid."

  "I'm not going to like this, am I?"

  "She very politely called the two cops who had been taking her money and told them she wouldn't
be bothering them again."

  "And you criticize Western manners." Despite the sun, the temperature suddenly seems to have dipped.

  "She told them I'd put her in touch with someone."

  "Just 'someone'?"

  "Well, no. You impressed her quite a bit. She apparently went on at some length."

  "And they're not happy." Rafferty finds himself scanning the street.

  "No," Arthit says. "I think it's accurate to say they're not happy. They were already spending the rest of her money."

  "This is great, Arthit. The only people in Bangkok more dangerous than the crooks are the cops."

  "Some of the cops." Arthit can be touchy about police corruption.

  "And these particular cops?"

  Arthit says, "They're in the some category." Then he says, "I faxed their names and ID pictures to you. You might want to keep your eyes open."

  "Are you in any danger?"

  "I laugh at danger," Arthit says. "But lock your doors."

  Okay. Cops after him. If anything happens to him, Arthit will know where to look. The thought is not particularly comforting.

  As long as he's standing in the shade, he pulls out the letter from Doughnut's dreaded reference. He privately dismisses Arthit's suggestion that Doughnut was a thief, because a woman who strikes terror into people, as her previous employer apparently does, would not be likely to recommend a servant with large pockets. He unfolds the photocopy and starts to punch the tiny buttons, then thinks better of it. One does not, he thinks, call a formidable woman, one who apparently has quintillions of baht, from a noisy sidewalk at 5:00 P.M. It isn't done. People don't like to be disturbed at the end of the day, especially when they're rich and old and the evening's pleasures beckon, whatever they may be. Cocktails, perhaps. Bloody Marys with real blood, if the woman at Bangkok Domestics' description was accurate.