A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Swelling's going down nicely," Arthit says untruthfully. "Do you suppose someone could put some of that ice into a glass of Mekhong?"

  "We don't have any. How about a beer?"

  "What kind?"

  "What have you got? Heineken?"

  "Singha," Rose says from the kitchen, to let them know she is listening.

  "How about a Singha?" Arthit says.

  Rose looks up from the ice she is pounding. "One?" It verges on a dare.

  "Two," Rafferty says.

  A beat. "You shouldn't drink beer with that pain medication."

  "Beer is a pain medication."

  "I know cats with more sense than most men," Rose says. She throws open the refrigerator door, letting it whack the counter.

  "So here's what I think, Arthit." Rafferty tries to get comfortable and fails. Even with the pills distributing millions of tiny pillows throughout his nervous system, a clenched fist slams the inside of his head every time his heart beats. "I went looking for Doughnut at Madame Wing's, and she hired me to find out about something else."

  "I suppose," Arthit says, sounding unconvinced. "Four of them, you say?"

  "With a sap and a gun. No match for me and the kid."

  "And you've never seen any of them before."

  "Well, they're not your two cops." He has told Arthit about the visit that afternoon. "They're just muscle. They didn't know anything besides what they said: 'Don't ask any more questions.' They were there to scare me, not kill me."

  "This time," Rose says as she comes out of the kitchen with the Singha. The glance she gives Rafferty as she hands his to him is icier than the beer.

  The beer is so cold it's thickening in the glass. The chill makes Rafferty's sinuses ache, and the fat, skunky fragrance fills his nostrils as he swallows. He feels better immediately. "What about my Cambodian?" he asks.

  Arthit looks over at Rose, who is pretending not to listen, and lowers his voice. "You going to go on with this?"

  "Sure," Rafferty says.

  "I don't know, Poke."

  "Well, I do. I can use that money. Miaow and I-"

  "Obviously," Arthit says, "but it won't do her much good if you're dead."

  "Everybody underestimates me." Rafferty takes another pull at his beer to accelerate the healing process. "It's my secret weapon."

  "Up to you," Arthit says in the tone of someone who realizes that rational argument is not an option. "There was only one Cambodian in the cell." He reaches into his tattered leather briefcase and takes out a sheaf of papers, fastened with a clip. "Chouk Ran. Age fifty-one. Here legally. No prior arrests. Five feet seven, dark complexion, left hand badly mangled. Missing fingernails. He was staying in a flophouse when he was arrested."

  "For what?"

  "Shoplifting at Foodland. Put up a fuss when he got caught, so they called the cops."

  "Shoplifting at Foodland?" Rafferty asks. "Come on. I know people who have been caught there. You give it back and slip the manager five hundred baht. They say thank you and good night. It's probably a line item in their spreadsheets."

  "He wouldn't play. Had plenty of money in his pocket, too."

  "What'd he take?"

  Arthit grins. "An electric mixer. One of those things for cakes. In a box, no less."

  "Not exactly something you can slip under a T-shirt. He just try to walk out with it?"

  "Big as life."

  "My, my," Rafferty says. "Either he really, really wanted to bake a cake or he wanted to go to jail."

  "Good place to meet crooks," Arthit says.

  Rafferty moves his head slowly from side to side and notices a novel blurring in the center of his vision as the room slides by. Pharmaceutical special effects. "Got a picture?"

  "Of course." Arthit folds back the top sheet to show Rafferty a photocopy of a mug shot. The man has a dark shock of hair, stiff as a whiskbroom, that seems to grow sideways on his head; a straight, strong mouth; and the eyes of someone who has seen considerably more than he was prepared to see. He stares at the camera as though it were a gun pointed at his head.

  "Not one of the guys in the alley," Rafferty says. The photo swims a little bit in front of him.

  "Too much to hope for." Arthit hands the papers to Rafferty. "I have no idea where you got these."

  "If you were this guy, Arthit, where would you be?"

  "It depends on what he's doing," Arthit says. "But if what Madame Wing said is true, I'd bet he won't get too far from her."

  "I don't think he'll get too close either," Rafferty says. He holds Arthit's gaze. "You haven't met Madame Wing."

  The Sizzler, which Superman chose since the meal is in his honor, is part of a little snarl of vehemently American fast-food mills on Silom that includes a Pizza Hut and a McDonald's. The boy wears one of his new shirts, the front geometrically adorned with a rectangle of creases where it was folded around the department-store stiffener. He keeps sharpening the creases between thumb and forefinger, and Rafferty realizes it is probably the first new prefolded shirt he has ever worn. The scrape over his eye has turned into a broad calligraphy brushstroke of brown.

  He looks very happy.

  He eats two sirloin steaks, barely chewing. His glance keeps floating up from the carnage on his plate to Rafferty. Miaow watches him eat with openmouthed admiration, as though he had personally materialized the food before eating it.

  Arthit has abandoned them, gone home to Noi.

  "I'm going to walk back," Rafferty says when they hit the pavement. It is almost nine o'clock, and the vendors are crowding the sidewalk across the street.

  "We'll all walk," Rose says. She has thawed some during dinner.

  "No, Rose, if you don't mind." The children are not exactly appropriate to this particular errand. "I'm going to take my time, work out some of this stiffness. And I have some thinking to do." He reaches across them and punches Superman lightly on the shoulder. The boy's eyes go wide, and then he grins and feints a punch back. "Thanks again," Rafferty says.

  When Rose and the children are half a block away, he crosses Silom. It seems to take a long time, and he recognizes that the pills are still at work. Walking a bit more deliberately than usual, he shoulders his way into the throng moving slowly in the narrow corridor between the rows of stalls. Watches, clothes, wood carvings, bootleg compact discs and audiotapes, hill-tribe artifacts, fake antiques, and silver jewelry gleam in the overhead spotlights.

  The dark spaces are what he wants. Without Arthit's guidance he would have walked right past them and not given them a glance.

  Dim little pools among the brightness. Just a card table with a man sitting behind it. On each card table are five or ten of the bright plastic albums that drugstores put snapshots in.

  Rafferty stops at the first of the booths.

  "Sit," the man says, pushing an overturned yellow plastic bucket toward him.

  "Japanese," Rafferty says, and the man selects a stack of albums and shoves it across the table. Rafferty flips it open.

  It is full of glossy color photos, five inches by seven, slipped into transparent sleeves just like pictures from a family holiday. Each photo is the neatly trimmed cover of a video box. Schoolgirls-or, rather, young women dressed in the Japanese schoolgirl uniform-peer up at him in improbably suggestive poses. Beaming girls wearing strategically positioned suds advertise videos set in "soaplands," the anything-goes Japanese version of the massage parlor. Close-ups of fresh-scrubbed faces promote the newest stars, most of whom look as though they've lived their entire lives on cotton candy and never uttered a nasty word. A year from now, these innocents will be dancing at Tokyo strip clubs that offer blow jobs in a little booth at the rear.

  The second and third albums offer more of the same. "Anything special?" Rafferty asks.

  The man counts down two or three more albums and pulls one out. Women with women, women with animals, women in the bathroom. Rafferty races through them in self-defense, but two pictures make him stop. Both feature women w
ho have been tied up and handcuffed. He shows them to the man behind the table. "More?"

  The man glances at the photos, and his mouth turns down. "Not have."

  "Do you know this man?" Rafferty asks, showing him the photograph of Claus Ulrich. He gets a quick glance and a shake of the head.

  "Thanks for the use of the bucket," Rafferty says, getting up. Too quickly: there is a little pop in his head and a sudden brightening of his vision. He has to put out a hand to remain upright.

  By the time he has hit three stalls, Rafferty has learned to stand more slowly. He has also developed an unaffectionate appreciation for the sheer volume and variety of Japanese porn. The fourth booth is presided over by an imperious-looking woman in her early thirties wearing a great many silver bracelets. She is doing business as fast as she can; Rafferty has to wait for an unoccupied bucket.

  "Japanese," he says, and as a shortcut he adds, "special."

  "No problem." She reaches under the table and brings out a stack of albums almost a foot high. The bracelets jingle gaily. "Have everything," she says proudly.

  And she does.

  If asked, Rafferty would have said he had led a reasonably active and varied sex life, but what he sees when he opens the first album makes him feel twelve years old. Vegetables? Dead fish? Panty hose? Diapers? There seems to be nothing that is not the object of a fetish for someone.

  He recognizes the first picture in the third album as the cover of one of the videos in Uncle Claus's secret drawer. Paging rapidly through the blur of four-color torment, spotting several more, Rafferty becomes keenly aware of all the people behind him. This is not how he wishes to be remembered. He hunches more closely over the album, realizes that it probably just makes him look even more furtive, and straightens up once more.

  He closes the last album and pushes the stack back toward the woman, who gives him a disappointed look. "Have something more special," she says, and starts to reach beneath the table again. Rafferty brings up both hands, palms out. Whatever it might be that is "more special," he will fight not to see it. He pulls the photo of Uncle Claus from his pocket and shows it to her, and she gives him a big smile.

  "Khun Claus," she says happily. "Number one customer. Every week four, five video."

  Good Lord, a footprint. Rafferty switches to Thai. "How long has it been since you saw him?"

  She gazes up at the phone wires, packed as always with a species of small birds that are distinguished by their extremely active lower digestive tracts. "Three months?" she asks thoughtfully. "Four?"

  "Does that happen often? That you don't see him for so long?"

  "Khun Claus travels," she says a bit grandly. "He lives in the world." She makes a gesture that is intended to sweep aside the borders of Thailand. "He comes, he goes."

  "Well, thanks." Rafferty stands up, eager to get away from the table and everything on it.

  "Three months," the woman says. Her eyes widen. "Do you think he was down there?"

  "I doubt it." He starts to turn away, then thinks of one more question. "Did he ever buy other kinds of videos from you?"

  She nods, eager to help. "Same kind." Then she motions him closer, and Rafferty leans in reluctantly, putting a hand out for balance. With this woman's standards, he does not want to hear anything she thinks needs to be whispered. She extends her hands to suggest handcuffs and says, "Sometimes boys."

  That night Rafferty sits shirtless at his desk, icing his shoulder and drawing with a soft pencil on a drafting pad. The green-shaded student lamp on the desk is the only light in the room. The boy is asleep on the couch, his mouth open. He has, Rafferty notices, very good teeth.

  A long time ago, he started to think of the books he wrote in terms of floor plans, working with pencil and eraser to explore the shape and balance of the manuscript without the distraction of words. Now he draws a floor plan of the mess he has gotten into, trying to create a geography of the situation.

  The front door of his floor plan is opened by Arthit, who directs him to Clarissa. A line joins both of them to the two rogue cops. Clarissa points him down a hallway to the rooms that represent Uncle Claus, rooms that were furnished with secrets and violent pornography but are abandoned now. A short corridor leads him to Doughnut's room, scoured clean and locked tight, linked by two lines, the first leading downstairs to Noot, working for Mr. Choy, and the other pointing toward a box for Bangkok Domestics. Bangkok Domestics is connected to the dark, gothic complex inhabited by Madame Wing, from which two lines run, one leading to the dead safecracker Tam and the other toward a mutilated Cambodian named Chouk Ran.

  If this were cosmology, the area surrounding all the neat little boxes would be the realm of quasars, dark matter, and the Great Attractor. Applying Arthit's suggestion of Occam's razor-the principle that says always to look for the simplest explanation-there would be a Great Attractor out there somewhere, pulling Doughnut, Uncle Claus, Madame Wing, Chouk Ran, and the others, known and unknown, toward a single point.

  If that were true, the course of action would be relatively simple: Find the Attractor and ambush them on their way to it. Except that Rafferty doesn't believe in the Great Attractor in this case. He thinks he's looking at two separate orbits that just happen to share some space.

  He rubs his stiff neck. Rose is asleep. Miaow is in her room.

  His shoulder throbs. The pain pills have given up for the night.

  He tears the page from the pad as quietly as he can and folds it into quarters without even knowing he is doing it. Then he drops the page into the wastebasket and gets up, pushing the chair back slowly. The boy doesn't stir as he passes, although Rafferty senses a coil of tension in the still form.

  The security lock is in place on the inside of the door, which means it would take two kicks to knock it in instead of one. Rafferty goes into the kitchen and pulls five or six cans of tomatoes from the shelves. Rose buys almost as many cans of tomatoes as she does jars of Nescafe. He carries them to the door and kneels, pulling the gun from his waistband and laying it on the carpet, because it pinches when he leans forward. He stacks the cans on top of each other, leaning slightly away from the door at an angle somewhat less acute than the one that distinguishes the Leaning Tower of Pisa. If the door opens even an inch, the cans will fall to the floor, making enough noise to wake everyone in the apartment.

  He checks the arrangement one last time and turns to see the boy up on one elbow, watching him.

  "Burglar alarm," Rafferty says, feeling silly. "Kind of low-tech, but it's what we have."

  "Good," the boy says with a nod. "Do you think they will come?" His voice is slightly hoarse, as though it does not get a lot of use.

  "No. But it's better to be ready."

  The boy's eyes go to the gun on the floor. "Can you shoot?"

  "Enough," Rafferty says. "Listen, I want you to sleep in Miaow's room."

  "Why?" the boy says immediately. He pulls back physically, shifting his weight to the other elbow.

  "I want the couch. If anybody comes in, I want to be the one who's out here."

  "You will need help." The boy has not moved.

  "And you can come in as soon as you hear anything wrong. That way you'll surprise them, like you did in the alley."

  "Okay." The boy gets up and wraps the sheet around him.

  "Great. And tomorrow you can repair my fax."

  "What's wrong with it?" The question comes quickly.

  "I'll tell you tomorrow. Thanks for your help tonight."

  The child thinks about it and then nods. "No problem." He trundles off down the hall, the sheet dragging behind him, and Rafferty goes into his bedroom to grab a blanket and a pillow.

  He settles in and knows in ten seconds it's not going to work. The couch is too short for him. It's still warm from the boy. It has lumps in it. There's nowhere to put his knees. The room is too bright. His arm and shoulder throb. He knows he will never get to sleep.

  When he wakes up, in broad daylight, the boy is sitting w
rapped in his sheet, on the floor halfway across the room, looking at him.

  25

  The Money Doesn't Matter

  He writes, carefully, "TEN MILLION BAHT."

  He had wanted to demand 25 million, but a quick calculation told him that it would be too bulky. Not manageable.

  Anyway, the money doesn't matter.

  The restaurant is as empty as before, but the waitress is awake. She greeted him as though he were a personal inconvenience, brought him his sweetened iced coffee silently, and retreated to her chair and a Thai movie magazine. The time is ten past four in the morning.

  Chouk Ran-the man who called himself Chon-has placed a bright blue zippered bag on the table beside his notepad and pencil. He bought it on the street only two days ago, and the zipper is already broken.

  He moves the bag aside with his elbow to give himself writing room.

  "You will need to buy two large suitcases," he writes. "They will need wheels, because they will be heavy." He pauses and reviews the letter in his mind, where he has written and rewritten it many times. He reproaches himself for his failure of nerve, for the time he has wasted: There are only six days remaining to him before one of them must die.

  "Put the money in the suitcases. It should be in bills of 500 and 1000 baht. Tomorrow afternoon at four, a maid from your house will come out of the gate alone, with the suitcases. This is why they must have wheels. She will turn left, walk to the intersection, and get a taxi. She will put the suitcases in the trunk. I know your staff by sight, so I will know if she is not one of your maids. I will know if she is not alone. I will know if she doesn't get a real taxi. If she does not follow directions, you will lose the money and you will not get the envelope."

  He sips the iced coffee. The ice has melted, and the drink tastes watery. He tries to remember when he slept last.

  "She will carry the cellular phone I have enclosed in this package," he writes. He reaches into the blue bag and pulls out a small Nokia cell phone. He pushes the "power" button and checks the battery level, although he has done this three times already.