A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  It is only 8:25 A.M.

  "You'd better tell me about it, Poke." Arthit, wrapped in a long overcoat against what he probably thinks is an early-morning chill, has a paper cup half full of coffee in his hand and a stiffness in his face warning Rafferty that their personal relationship is not at the fore-front of the conversation.

  "Tell you about what? You called me here, remember?"

  "The safecracker. Why were you asking about Cambodian safecrackers?

  Rafferty takes another step away from the body and lets his eyes wander over the blank wall opposite, a reassuringly detail-free wall without a single window. "Well, Arthit, since you ask so nicely, what level of detail would you prefer?"

  "Microscopic."

  So he tells it all, beginning with the maid's reference from Madame Wing, right through the hole in the lawn and the empty safe and the missing whatever-it-is.

  Arthit listens without so much as a nod. "And where have you gotten on it?"

  "Nowhere. I was going to start after lunch."

  "Well, you've just started." He lifts the cup in the direction of the body. "Meet Tam. Not Cambodian, but definitely a safecracker. One of our best." Arthit's tone is regretful. "Wasted here, really. Had the kind of skills he could have put to better use in Monaco or Switzerland, someplace with really serious safes."

  "But she said he was a Cambodian."

  "He was probably hired by a Cambodian."

  "You think he's my guy. Why?"

  Arthit dips a hand into one of the pockets on his outsize coat and comes up with a steamed dumpling wrapped in paper. "Hold this," he says, thrusting the coffee at Rafferty and peeling the paper back from the bun. When his mouth is full, he says, "See any mud in this alley?"

  Rafferty doesn't have to look. "Only on the-on him, I mean."

  "Very good." He repossesses the coffee. "So, to pursue the Socratic method further, where is Madame Wing's house?"

  "The river, Arthit. And don't ask me what you get all over you when you dig a hole near the river."

  "Wouldn't dream of it. If Socrates had known where to stop, he might not have had to drink that hemlock cocktail."

  Four policemen come into the alley with a stretcher. Beyond them Rafferty can see the crowd of onlookers, see the dirt on their faces and the rips in their clothing. Klong Toey is Bangkok's port and one of its worst slums. The people craning their necks are poor and probably hungry, but they are alive.

  "So this guy is muddy-"

  "Tam." Arthit puts some force into the syllable, and Rafferty knows he is being reminded that the man had a name and people who called him by it. A life.

  "Tam, then. Is that all? He's muddy?"

  "No. He was working for a Cambodian. We've already interviewed his wife. One of the first cops on the scene recognized him, and somebody went to talk to her. Tam told her all about the assignment. He was going to make her rich. Thought he was going after the Saudi crown jewels."

  The crook's chimera. "Can I talk to her?"

  "Under normal circumstances you'd enjoy it. I'm told she's ravishing, real trip-over-the-curb material. I don't know why I never expect crooks to have good marriages, but she's devastated by Tam's death. So, sure, you can talk to her, but I don't know what you'll get. She never saw the guy." He wads up the paper wrapping from his bun and shoves it into his pocket. When his hand comes out, it has another bun in it.

  "Anyway," Rafferty says, "what's the point?" He sees the second half of Madame Wing's fee fade into the distance. "I haven't got a job anymore."

  One of Arthit's eyebrows comes up. Rafferty secretly thinks he practices in front of a mirror. "No? Why not?"

  "There's been a murder, hasn't there? It's police business now."

  Slowly and deliberately, giving it all his attention, Arthit nods. "Well, as you say, it's a murder. You'd certainly think the police would leap into it, wouldn't you?" He glances around the alley, at the stretcher bearers and the knot of cops gathered near the body. "Why don't you just step around the corner with me while we explore this further?"

  Rafferty follows him out of the alley into the sunlight, and they take up a spot against the wall of a building that leans alarmingly toward the street. A thousand-watt glare from Arthit pushes the spectators back a respectful distance.

  "Moving right along," Arthit says, picking absently at the paper on the second bun. "Maybe you can suggest to me the names of two or three police officers who would like to be the ones to find the link between the murder of a safecracker in Klong Toey and the rich and connected Madame Wing. Maybe you can even help us frame the delicate language in which we make the connection. Especially since it was almost certainly Madame Wing's own employees who carted the dead man away and dropped him in that alley, making her an accessory after the fact, at the very least."

  "Why do you think that?"

  "Our Cambodian obviously got what he wanted, because you've been hired to find it. Not much point in hauling a body across town when you're carrying something valuable. On the other hand, for a rich woman with a secret, Tam's body would be like hanging out a flag." He looks down at the bun and extends it toward Rafferty, who shakes his head, unable even to look at it.

  "So if you can accomplish all that in a way that will advance the career of the lucky officer, as opposed to bringing it to a decisive halt, then you can definitely help me."

  "You have a problem," Rafferty says sympathetically.

  "I'm not so sure I'm the one with the problem," Arthit says, looking directly at him.

  "Aahhh." Rafferty waves the bun away again, and this time Arthit draws his hand back. "So what you're suggesting-"

  "I'm not suggesting anything," Arthit says. "I asked you for information, and you provided it to me. I, being possessed of a free and open nature, then shared some information with you. Upon reflection I've decided that the murder of a professional safecracker, however beautiful his widow, does not warrant an extensive commitment of police resources in these troubled times. We have the public safety to consider. We ate a fine breakfast, or at least I did, and we went our separate ways."

  Rafferty needs to be sure. "You to police work, and I-"

  "To do whatever you wish," Arthit says blandly. "Earning favors, perhaps."

  There is a bustle of motion from the alley, and the stretcher bearers come out, their shoulders hunched against Tam's weight. One well-shaped hand hangs over the edge of the stretcher, bouncing with the bearers' steps. To Rafferty it looks like someone gesturing for attention.

  "Got it," he says.

  "Of course, given my concern for your safety," Arthit continues, "I will expect us to keep each other informed." He pushes himself away from the wall, slopping some coffee on the sidewalk. The coat looks very heavy on his shoulders.

  Rafferty follows him to a waiting car, and Arthit slides in.

  "Arthit."

  His tone stops Arthit from closing the door. Arthit waits, taking a first bite out of the bun.

  "I think there's blood in Claus Ulrich's apartment." He tells Arthit about the stains in the bathroom and then about the videotapes and the missing software.

  Arthit's mouth twists as though the pork in the bun has gone bad. "You can buy the porn on Silom Road at night, right on the sidewalk. Illegal, of course, but so is half of everything people do in Bangkok. The stains are heaviest near the tub?"

  "A few splashes farther out."

  "Probably didn't cut himself shaving, then," Arthit says, and it suddenly occurs to Rafferty that his friend has seen many more bodies than he has. After peering beneath the polite veil of the social fabric long enough to write three books on the underbelly of Asia, Rafferty thought he had become hardened, but compared to Arthit he's a fluffy animal toy.

  "It might not be blood," he says without much conviction.

  "I'll get someone to check it. If we've got two dead people, you were probably right. There's a connection, and it's the maid."

  "She does keep popping up."

  "You're pretty
good at this," Arthit says around a fresh mouthful of steamed bun.

  "I don't know. I do know, though, that I'm not good enough at it to chow down while a dead man's lying six feet away. Gnawing away at that bun like that."

  "Life goes on," Arthit says. He leans back against the seat and closes his eyes for a moment. "If there's one thing we've learned, all of us, in the last few weeks, it's that life goes on."

  20

  Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen to Them

  Tam's widow, Mai, is one of the most beautiful human beings Rafferty has ever seen. Her eyes-puffy now from crying-tilt upward above an extraordinary pair of cheekbones, smooth enough to have been shaped by running water. Her nose is delicate and finely formed. She wears her black hair chopped short to reveal a swan's neck and collarbones as refined as an angel's wings. The tilted eyes are a light brown with flecks of gold buried in them. She is the color of weak tea, with a hint of heat just beneath the skin.

  "He was the sweetest man," she is saying. "He even loved my mother." The memory of his sweetness brings the tissue back up to her eyes. The floor of the neat little apartment, a concrete cube as brightly decorated as a doll's house, is littered with tight balls of Kleenex from the box on the table in front of her. The woman has been crying for hours.

  "I'm sure your mother-" Rafferty begins helplessly, demonstrating all his skill with female grief.

  "My mother is a dragon," Mai says. She wads up the latest Kleenex and throws it at the carpet. It rolls up against the television, and Rafferty sees, on top of the big, old-fashioned set, a color photo of her and Tam, framed in teak. They look young and radiant and secure. The world has just been waiting for their arrival to make it complete. Nothing bad will ever happen to them.

  Through the window above the TV set, Rafferty can see the sloping corrugated-iron roofs that keep the rain out of a rambling cluster of squatters' shacks. The building in which Mai lived with Tam is a modest apartment house in aggressively unadorned Soviet cement, obviously put up ten or twelve years ago in the expectation that the neighborhood would somehow mysteriously gentrify. The occupants of the shacks, only a couple of dilapidated miles from the alley where Tam's body was found, have apparently not gotten the news, or perhaps the general or police captain who owns the land is waiting for a better offer before he calls in the bulldozers. The result is a representative square of the Bangkok patchwork: poverty, aspiration, and affluence, jammed side by side, kings next to deuces as though a pack of cards has been thrown into the air. Beyond the shimmering iron of the shacks' roofs, the broad brown ribbon of the Chao Phraya winds its way to the Gulf of Thailand.

  "I told him to stop," Mai says. She puts a hand on top of her head, as though to keep it from exploding. "I told him to do something else. I begged him, told him we didn't need the money, it wasn't worth the risk. He was so proud of what he could do. 'Top two percent,' he kept saying. 'It's all in the fingers.' Like he was a magician or a violin player, not a criminal." She stops, blinks. "The Cambodian man was a violin player."

  "He was?"

  "Well, he said he was. That's one reason Tam took the job." She dabs at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Tam said they were both artists."

  "Did you tell that to the police?"

  "I didn't believe it," she says. "I asked how he could play the violin with a hand that looked like a spider. Tam said he didn't even have fingernails. They'd been pulled out."

  "Oh," Rafferty says, putting his own hands in his pockets.

  "And his name, that was a lie, too. Chon. It's not even a real name. It sounds like something somebody made up who had heard Thai spoken on the radio." She has worked a fingernail into the seam of the couch cushion and is slowly slitting it open. A little bubble of foam rubber bulges out. "A violin player with a fake name. The Saudi jewels. How could he have been so stupid?" A sob catches in her throat and sends her free hand to the Kleenex box, but the one on top has failed to pop up, and she takes both hands and rips the box in half. Tissues flutter to the floor. "What am I going to do?"

  "Do you-" He stops. "Do you have any money?" A fat fold of Madame Wing's fills his pocket.

  The sob tails off into a sniffle, followed by a dab at her nose. "Money's no problem. I have a job. I've always had a job. What I don't have is a husband."

  "Are there…um, are there children?"

  "He was my child." She begins to weep again. "He was my child and my father and my husband. He surrounded me. I don't even know where I am anymore." She grabs a handful of tissues angrily and scrubs her face with them, then balls them up and tosses the wad, hard, at the window. "Are you married?"

  "Not at the moment."

  "Then you don't know anything," she says, not unkindly.

  "I know I can find the man who did this to you."

  She looks up at him, evaluating the worth of the offer. He has not taken a chair, although she offered him one. It seems impolite to do anything but stand in the presence of such sorrow. So there he stands, shambling and ill at ease, the duffel bag full of burglar tools sitting heavily at his feet like a sleeping dog. "It won't bring him back."

  "No. Nothing will bring him back."

  She exhales for what seems like a minute, so long that Rafferty half expects her to disappear. "Why bother, then?"

  "Because it's wrong," Rafferty says. "Because he killed your husband and made you unhappy. Because somebody should make him pay."

  She shrugs, and it seems to require all her energy. "He'll pay for it in a future life."

  "I'd like to make him pay for it in this one. While I'm around to watch."

  "Why? What does this mean to you? We don't even know you."

  "I'm tired of death. And I'm sick of deaths no one can do anything about. Nobody can take revenge on a wave. It's just a wave. Even if you wanted to for some reason, you couldn't find the water that formed the wave, could you? It's disappeared back into the ocean. But a man isn't a wave." He realizes he has raised his voice and makes a conscious effort to lower it. "You can find a man."

  She is still, toying with a new Kleenex. Then, slowly, she tears it in half. "If you say so."

  "Do you know where they met?"

  "In jail. Tam did something stupid, and they put him in jail. They were in the same cell just before he was released."

  "How many in the cell?"

  "I don't know. Eight, ten. What difference does it make?"

  Rafferty pulls out his notebook. "It could give me a name. When was he in jail? When did he get out? Which jail?"

  She closes her eyes, sealing herself off while she works through some private process. Then she sighs deeply and gets up from the couch.

  "I'll get my journal," she says.

  21

  Toadface and Skeletor

  Bangkok, planted atop a river plain, is as flat as a piece of paper. The city slopes up slightly on either side of the river, but the incline is barely visible. The effluent-choked canals that once earned the city a highly misleading reputation as the Venice of the East flow between banks that rarely rise by more than three or four feet over the course of miles. Many of them now are too polluted and stinking to be navigated by anyone except locals in rough wooden flatboats.

  In many great cities, the rich live within sight of water or on the heights. In Bangkok the water is likely to have wooden shacks built out over it with holes cut in the floor to serve as toilets. A river view here may mean nothing more than an extra ration of rats. Lacking hills to build upon, the city's rich create height with skyscrapers and then move to the top. An economic map of Bangkok would have to be constructed in three dimensions, with much of the money floating well above ground level.

  On his way home from Mai's apartment near Klong Toey, Rafferty's tuk-tuk passes through a misassembled jigsaw puzzle of urban landscapes: one-story cement shops with sliding iron grilles across the front, the chromium glitter of nightlife areas, the occasional placid narrow street lined by trees and the high walls of the wealthy, much like those surrounding Mad
ame Wing. Bright new steel-and-glass apartment houses share a property line with tacked-together wooden slums that look like collections of driftwood. Silom Boulevard, off of which he lives, is a hybrid: a Western-style shopping area packed with restaurants, modern department stores, and expensive boutiques, all reached by threading one's way through the little vendors' booths that crowd the sidewalk, most numerous where Patpong empties into Silom like, Rose might say, a poisoned river. A sharp left takes Rafferty onto his own soi, an aggregate of still-inexpensive apartment houses of which his own, the Lovely Arms, is perhaps the least expensive. But it's the closest thing to a home he's had in the years he's spent chasing himself across Asia to write his books and articles.

  It's probably because he does feel so at home there that he fails at first to notice the two men in the corridor when he gets off the elevator. He's pulled out his keys before he registers their presence, and the day suddenly goes very sour indeed.

  Two policemen, poised to knock two doors up from his, have turned to look at him. Rafferty tucks his keys into his fist so the points protrude, an impromptu pass at brass knuckles. He gets a better hold on the duffel bag, its weight suddenly reassuring rather than bothersome. There's no way around the fact that these are the cops whose faces and information Arthit faxed him.

  "You," one of them says loudly. He's short and fat, with a toad-like face that reminds Rafferty of an Olmec head. Rafferty has no idea what the other one looks like, because he can't get his eyes any higher than the automatic the man has drawn.

  "I told you it was 8-A," says the man with the automatic.

  As the two of them approach, Rafferty spreads his feet slightly and bends his knees just enough to give him some spring, then wraps his hand more tightly around the duffel's handle. The one with the gun in his hand is thinner than his partner and dirtier, with a face so gaunt it makes Rafferty think of the cartoon character Skeletor. His uniform is smudged with dirt and spots of something that could be blood, hot sauce, or both.