A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Mr. Rafferty," Pak says.

  "I'm going to work this out," he says, his voice ragged with anger, "but not because of you. Because a Thai safecracker named Tam got killed by your Mr. Chouk, and he had a very sweet wife whose heart was broken by it. And thanks for telling me about the dead man. You can pay me or not, I don't give a shit. I never want to lay eyes on you again." He wheels around and says to Pak, "Get out of my way."

  "Stop, Mr. Rafferty," Madame Wing says. "Please stop."

  "I don't brake for assholes."

  "You want to solve this, don't you? For whoever it was. Then you have to see what else he sent me."

  He turns back to her in spite of himself. "What?"

  "You'll be interested," she says acidly. "Follow me."

  She wheels herself past Pak, past Rafferty, and through the door, the wheelchair making its trapped-animal squeal. Rafferty tracks her down a long hallway into a spacious, formal room. On the floor of the room are two large, open suitcases. At first Rafferty thinks they are full of rags. Then he looks more closely and inhales so sharply he starts to cough.

  "Ten million baht," Madame Wing says. "Shredded."

  He hears a rustle of paper behind him, but he can't stop looking at the shredded money, ten million baht cut into narrow, worthless strips. "He also sent this," Madame Wing says.

  He tears his eyes away from the suitcase to see her holding out a sheet of cheap notebook paper. It is written in a language he cannot read, just a few short words, a single line of flowing script.

  "What does it say?"

  She looks up at him with those luminous nocturnal eyes. "It says 'I want the deed to your house.'"

  He looks back at the spirals of paper, worthless now. Trying to measure the amount of hate in the gesture. Against all his instincts, he realizes, he wants to know more about that hate.

  He says, "Give me the deed."

  PART III

  Hammerstrike

  31

  Nobody Has to Know Everything

  For the second day in a row, Rafferty is up at six. After months of trying to get up early and failing, he has found the remedy: Sleep on a lumpy couch in the apartment's brightest room. He is at the kitchen counter, working on his second cup of coffee, when Miaow comes briskly into the living room. Her school clothes are primly immaculate, seams plumb straight, her face shining with the effect of the cold water she uses to wake herself up. Her hair is so precisely in place it looks like she arranged it one strand at a time. Rafferty's joints grow weak at the sight of her.

  She is preoccupied, all business, and he has a sudden vision of what she will look like as an adult: She will look like a corporate vice president. She stops at the couch, notices the blanket Rafferty dropped when he got up, and goes through a small pantomime of exasperation. She does everything but shake her head. With an expression of sorely tried patience, she picks up the blanket and refolds it into sharp-cornered quarters. When she has placed it neatly at the head of the couch, she turns and sees him for the first time. Her eyebrows chase each other toward her hairline.

  "Good morning, Miaow."

  She looks at him, then at the clock on his desk. "Am I late for school?"

  "No. I'm early. I want to talk to you about something."

  She purses her mouth, bringing Mrs. Pongsiri to mind, and angles her head slightly in the direction of her room, the direction of Superman. "A problem?"

  "Not about him," Rafferty says. "And not a problem, really. A good thing."

  He watches her cross the room and climb up onto the chair beside him. He suddenly realizes he has no idea what her morning routine might be. A pang of guilt pierces him: What kind of father is he? "Do you want some milk or something? Cereal? Eggs?"

  "An orange," she says. "And a Coke."

  "Coke? At this hour? And an orange?"

  "That's what I eat," she says patiently. "Every morning."

  "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," his mother says in his voice.

  "Is that why you're just drinking coffee?" She makes a grimace. "Coffee." She says it the way she might say "mucus." "Bean drink. Hot bean drink. And you give me a hard time."

  "I'm a grown-up. I don't need breakfast."

  "And you hate it," Miaow says.

  "There's that," he acknowledges.

  "I hate it, too. This is my breakfast. A Coke and an orange. Unless we have grapes."

  "I see." He has run out of things to say, so he gets up and grabs an orange and a can of warm Coke. "It's a pretty awful breakfast," he says, pouring the Coke.

  "I know," she says, closing the subject.

  "Ice?" The question is ridiculous and he knows it.

  She doesn't even look up. "Oh, please." She manages to pack into the words a remarkable amount of world-weariness for someone who's only eight.

  "I have to say something, Miaow. It's sort of my job."

  "I'm used to being alone in the morning," she says with a tinge of grumpiness.

  "Me, too." He sits across the counter from her on the living-room side, so he can see her face. The two grumps share a companionable silence as she peels her orange. Its sharp fragrance invades his nostrils. He can hear the Coke fizzing in the glass. He feels inexplicably happy. How could he have missed this for so many mornings?

  "What are we supposed to be talking about?" she says with her mouth full.

  "I want you to stay with me," he says.

  She looks up at him, chewing. "I am staying with you."

  "No. I mean forever. Permanently." After what he went through with Rose, he has no idea how Miaow will react. He can feel his heart bumping its way around inside his chest as though it's gotten lost.

  She looks quickly away, her face closed. For a long moment, she works on chewing her orange. Then she says, "Okay."

  Rafferty makes a firm decision that he will not burst into tears. He concentrates on the orange, half peeled on the table, on how the light strikes the jeweled sections and the fine white threads, and then he says, "Up until now we've been kind of breaking the law. I want to adopt you. Officially. Do you know what that means?"

  She still has not looked at him. "Sure," she says. "It means you're really my…um, my father. Instead of just pretend."

  "That's right." He has difficulty getting the words out, and she darts him a glance at the sound of his voice, then looks away again. He clears his throat and says, "That's what I want."

  "Oh," she says to the refrigerator. Then she says, "Me, too."

  Oranges smell like happiness, Rafferty thinks. "We have to go talk to a man today. He's a nice man named Hank Morrison."

  "Khun Hank," she says. "All the kids know him."

  "Do they like him?"

  "He helps." Her enthusiasm is somewhat reserved.

  "Well, we have to go talk to him today, after school. He's going to ask us questions, about how we live here and about what happened to you before you came here."

  Her shoulders rise protectively. "What kind of questions?"

  "About everything," he says.

  She looks him full in the face and then, slowly, lowers her eyes until she is gazing at the surface of the counter. With a coiled index finger, she strikes the half orange, sending it spinning.

  Rafferty waits until the orange wobbles to a stop. "He'll ask you some questions I've never asked you. I want you to promise me you'll tell him the truth."

  "He doesn't have to know everything," she says. "Nobody has to know everything."

  "He has to know everything."

  Her face sets. "No." She strips a thread from the orange and rolls it into a tight ball between thumb and forefinger, then flicks it-hard-across the room at the refrigerator. Her spine is rigid.

  "It's to help us. He has to ask the questions, or the police won't let me adopt you."

  She pushes her chair back stiffly, ignoring the half-eaten orange. "I'm going to be late for school."

  "So you'll be late. What're they going to do, chop you up and fry you?" He puts a ha
nd flat on the counter between them. "Listen, Miaow, I can make you a promise. I promise he won't tell me what you talk about if you don't want him to. But you have to talk to him."

  She looks down at her lap, evaluating the weight of the promise. "We'll see," she says, and Rafferty hears his own equivocation, refined over a lifetime, coming back at him, from a child he has known only a few months. As he watches her shoulder her book pack and close the door behind her, he wonders what other dubious gifts he may have passed on.

  Ulrich's drapes are open. Someone has been here. Rafferty pauses at the door, holding it open, listening. It is not difficult for him to imagine someone else standing absolutely still in one of the rooms, listening as well. After a minute or so, he figures the hell with it and goes in. He picks up one of the small stone apsarases, hefts it like a club, grabs the gun with his free hand, and does a quick search. He is alone.

  The place is hot again. As little as he wants to touch them, he has come to look for manufacturers' marks on the whips and restraints in the bottom drawer of the cabinet; they might tell him where they were bought. He is dreading the moment he has to pick them up. The instant he enters the office, he stops as suddenly as he would if he had walked into a glass door.

  Uncle Claus's CD-ROMs are back.

  Not all of them, he sees, as he nears the desk. There are three empty slots in the storage tower. The others have been returned, presumably by whoever removed them in the first place, which-according to the woman next door-had been Doughnut. Considering all the trouble she took to gain access to Claus Ulrich's life in the first place and the care with which she erased her presence when she left, it must have been important to her to return to take these things away, and equally important to bring them back.

  He sits down at the desk and turns on the computer. While he waits for it to go through its internal checklist, he opens the first of the CD cases, which says WINDOWS 98.

  The disk inside is home-burned from a blank available everywhere in Bangkok, ten disks for two to ten bucks, depending on the gullibility of the buyer. Written neatly near the center, in black permanent marker, is the notation "AT Series 400–499."

  AT Series. AT Enterprises, the letterhead in the drawer. He opens the next case, watching the irritating hourglass on the computer screen and asking himself for the thousandth time why they couldn't have programmed the damn thing to actually fill with sand so you'd have some idea how far along you are. How difficult could it be? The second disk is in a box that says COREL WORDPERFECT, but it too is home-burned. The notation says "AT Series 600–699."

  He opens all the cases, arranging the disks by number. When he's finished, he has a pile of jewel boxes on the floor and thirteen disks spread out across the desk, beginning with AT Series 0001–0099 and ending with 1500–1599. Missing are 500–599, 700–799, and 800–899.

  The computer is ready at last. He slaps the 0001–0099 disk in the drive and looks at the directory.

  The files are, as promised, numbered AT 0001 through AT 0099. They are.jpg files, which means pictures. His heart sinks at the information. He does not really think he wants to look at these.

  And until he sees the first one, he has no idea how right he is.

  Chouk has asked himself a hundred times whether he should make the payment he promised the guard. He knows the risks, knows it is one of the few times he will be exposed. For the first time since he intercepted the maid to take delivery of the money, he will have to arrange a meeting. Madame Wing will be far more vigilant, now that he has returned her money, shredded into scrap, and made his second demand.

  How he wishes he could have been there when she opened the suitcases. Perhaps the guard knows how she reacted. That alone would almost be worth the risk of paying him.

  Why had Tam looked at the photos? He has talked with Tam incessantly in his head since that night, trying to explain why he pulled the trigger: the risk that Tam would turn on him, that he would go to Madame Wing. No one can be allowed to prevent Chouk from completing his work. He has made promises to too many people who are now long gone.

  But still, Tam had loved his wife, and she probably loved him in return. Chouk has ruined two lives.

  It is fitting, he thinks, that Tam had known him by a different name. Chouk no longer knows who he is; he is as hollow as a ghost. All that remains is the course he has set. Motion is everything.

  He is no longer Chouk Ran. He is just whoever it is who is doing this.

  And she will pay for that, and for all those she destroyed.

  But still, the bits of him that remain are troubled. He killed Tam, and if he does not pay the guard, he will have abandoned both of the people who helped him. He could not have done what he has already done without their aid. Even though they did it for money, not because they believed in his mission.

  He looks around the rented room he has slept in for two nights. Unlike the flophouses, here there are no rows of bunks; it has a door and walls to keep people out. He needed the privacy to handle the money. The large shredder he bought at the office store gleams in the corner. He should probably change rooms, but he can't face the work of moving the shredder. He had no idea how heavy it would be.

  With a strong feeling he is doing the wrong thing, he goes down to the street to find a pay phone.

  A cheap hotel room. It could be any of a thousand hotels, anywhere in Southeast Asia. Cold light comes through a small window. It is probably raining.

  The bed is narrow, with a garish red coverlet. The floor is dirty linoleum. There is no rug or other furniture except an attached bed table and a large, old-style phone with a dial.

  A number hotel, maybe.

  In 1982.

  Uncle Claus's camera had an automatic date-stamp function, and he occasionally forgot to turn it off. The picture on the screen is dated 9-16-82.

  The little girl hog-tied on the bed was somewhere between eight and ten on September 16, 1982. The ropes bite into her wrists and ankles, and her defenseless stomach is bare and streaked with red.

  She is crying.

  The series began with photos of her wearing the clothes of poor Southeast Asian children everywhere: T-shirt, shorts, sandals. She had been smiling in the first few shots. She stopped smiling when her clothes began to come off. She started crying when the hot red wax dripped from the candle onto her bare chest.

  After he has looked at fifteen or twenty pictures, Rafferty gets up and goes to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. On his way back to the computer, he stops at the filing cabinet and, for the first time, forces himself to pull out the restraints, the leather straps and gags and handcuffs and the collar with the spikes set into its edges that are designed to cut into the neck and chest.

  They are tiny.

  He returns to the screen and searches further through the pictures, feeling the fury rise in him, mixed with a swelling terror. He has difficulty forcing himself to keep his eyes on the screen, and he jumps to his feet and steps back, believing for a moment he will pass out, when he gets to the picture of the child with the electric iron on her chest. Her right arm is thrown over her eyes, her mouth wide in pain. Her ankles had been cuffed together so she couldn't kick in self-defense.

  He was in some of the pictures, too, a naked fat man with his face crudely blacked out with Magic Marker. He held a camera remote in one hand, with a button at one end of it. He depressed the button to snap a picture whenever he was satisfied with the level of monstrosity being inflicted on the bright red bed.

  There are almost sixteen hundred of them.

  Rafferty feels the sickness and the fear rise up in him again, but he forces them away and then lets the fear back in, lets it drive him forward despite his revulsion as he keeps looking, opening one disk after another, paging through the photos as quickly as the computer will allow, looking at nothing but the faces and paying special attention to the later ones, the 1300, 1400, and 1500 series, some of which are date-stamped within the past three to four years. The most recent imag
e with a date stamp, AT1548, was taken in 2003.

  He is looking for Miaow.

  This is something she would never talk to him about. She would never talk about it to anyone. If it is here, if she is here, he has to know it before they meet with Hank Morrison in-what? Three or four hours? He has been here, in this hell, for hours.

  If she is among these tiny victims he needs to know it, before he forces her to tell this story to Morrison. Face after face, scream after scream, he searches for her.

  And finds Superman.

  He is one of only four boys. Uncle Claus definitely preferred to torment girls. He gave special attention to the boys, however. They presented a different set of anatomical possibilities. What he did to Superman passes Rafferty's understanding so completely that it seems like the work of a different species.

  Sixteen hundred photos. At least forty children.

  By the time Rafferty turns off the computer, he could kill Claus Ulrich himself.

  The phone rings deep in the pocket of Rafferty's jeans, hard to fish out in the cramped backseat of a tuk-tuk. He doesn't even hear it at first. He is trying to lose himself in the heat and light of the day, trying to leave the morning and its bright, terrible screen behind. It is a window he wishes he had never opened.

  He wrestles the phone free on the fifth ring and surveys the traffic in front of him. If they don't get a break, he is going to be late meeting Miaow.

  "Poke," Arthit says. "There's a lot happening. The stains in the bathroom are blood."

  "Good."

  "Excuse me?"

  "The man was a pig. No, that's not fair to pigs. I'll tell you about it when I see you."

  "And another thing. The address for Doughnut's sister was real, but she's moved. A while back, one neighbor says. But, Poke? The blood changes things. I've got two patrolmen talking to everyone in the building. She must have told someone where she was going."