A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "It's not that serious."

  Morrison sweeps a hand toward his desk. "This is how serious it is. Those papers are the forms you have to fill out to move forward with this. Two minutes after you and Miaow came into this room, I decided to ask you to fill them out today. Well, I'll tell you what, Poke. I'm going to put them back in the drawer until you've convinced me that you're capable of giving that little girl a stable environment."

  "Hank," Rafferty says. "This situation-it started out simply and got very bad very quickly. I began by trying to help a young woman whose uncle disappeared here in Bangkok, and I wound up stumbling over the worst, most violent child pornography you can imagine." Morrison's face goes absolutely still, and he sits even straighter. "I can't drop it, Hank, but I don't really think we're in danger. I haven't met a lot of child pornographers, but I doubt they'd hurt anyone their own size."

  "These pictures," Morrison says slowly. He stops and sits forward, as though he has cramps. "You said violent." Rafferty nods. "Are they of Asian kids?"

  "Yes."

  "Mostly ten, eleven, twelve? Mostly girls?"

  Rafferty feels a wave of discomfort. "And a few boys."

  Morrison takes a breath deep enough to empty the room of air. "Tied up, being tortured?"

  Rafferty meets his eyes. "My turn to ask a question. Why do you know about this?"

  "Poke." Morrison puts out both hands, palms forward, a gesture that says Stop. "I work with these kids. I've worked with them for twenty years. There isn't much that's happened to them that I don't know about." He gets up, not going anywhere, just moving to move. "How could I do this job if I didn't try to understand their lives?" He stops pacing and puts his hands on his hips, looking down at Poke. "These pictures. Do they have a title?"

  Rafferty can't think of any reason not to tell him. "The AT Series."

  "My God. Is this man in Bangkok?"

  "If he's alive, he's in Bangkok."

  "But he may not be alive?"

  "I'm glad to say, Hank, that I think, actually, he's not."

  "Hallelujah, it's Christmas," Morrison says. "But then what are you looking for?"

  "The person who probably killed him. And, if I can find them, the names of anybody he might have shared his hobby with."

  "Where'd you get the pictures?"

  "Out of the guy's apartment."

  Morrison's mouth opens, and he closes it again. "I don't know why I'm so surprised. I always figured the fucker was based here."

  "For about twenty years," Rafferty says.

  "I know some of these kids," Morrison says. "They've been torn into tiny pieces."

  "Hank," Rafferty says, and his tone brings Morrison's head around. "Superman was one of them."

  As they cross the orphanage playground, Miaow reaches up and takes Rafferty's hand. He gives hers a slight squeeze and gets back a grip that makes his knuckles crack.

  "I love you, Miaow," he says.

  Miaow squeezes even harder.

  Rafferty's emotions are a skein of conflicting feelings: revulsion at what he saw on Ulrich's computer, a mixture of pity and horror caused by the sight of the scars on the wrist of Doughnut's sister, a hatred of Claus Ulrich so intense it vibrates in his chest. Against those are the exhilaration he feels about the interview and Morrison's reluctant reconsideration of Superman in light of the fact the boy was one of Ulrich's victims. He might be able to help him after all.

  And Morrison had let him fill out the forms. On this front, anyway, Rafferty thinks, everything may work out. The idea makes him so happy he laughs out loud, and Miaow looks up at him, grabs his arm with both hands, and presses her head against his hand.

  For Rafferty, time stands still.

  33

  A Whole New Standard for Awful

  If I had a to-do list, Rafferty thinks, it wouldn't have a single thing crossed out.

  In two days he's made no progress at all. Arthit hasn't found a scrap of data on Doughnut in any of the city's databases. The battered guard from Madame Wing's hasn't set foot outside his apartment. Chouk Ran has not contacted Madame Wing.

  Doughnut has not called.

  The forgery of the deed to Madame Wing's house has been made and one copy sent to her, but nothing has happened to bring it into play.

  When Rose comes home from Bangkok Domestics with the news that two of her women have gotten jobs, but also reports that the woman who runs the business had treated her with contempt, it is almost a relief for Rafferty to pick up the phone and methodically take the woman apart. When he is finished, Superman is regarding him with raised eyebrows that signal something like admiration.

  While Miaow was at school, Rafferty played Tetris on his computer with Superman and suffered one humiliating defeat after another. The boy could see patterns faster than Rafferty could blink. It wouldn't have been so bad if the kid hadn't laughed, an irritating roosterlike sound, every time Rafferty made a mistake.

  "Not so long ago," Rafferty said in English, "I'd have given anything to hear you laugh. Now I'd give anything if you stopped."

  The distraction of the computer gave Rafferty the time he needed to be able to look at Superman without seeing the battered, violated boy in the cheap hotel room. By the fourteenth straight loss, Rafferty could meet the boy's eyes.

  While Rafferty stewed over the lack of progress, the boy fixed the garbage disposal, the toaster, the stuck window, the light switch in Miaow's room, the light leaks around the air conditioner, and the combination mechanism on Rafferty's suitcase, which had been permanently locked. He also eradicated the stain on the carpet, to Rose's obvious pleasure.

  Rafferty and Rose did not discuss their situation, but there was a lightness to her-in her bearing, in her voice-that made Rafferty smile at inappropriate moments. Superman took to imitating him, which Miaow found hilarious.

  On the third night, Rose went home to clean her own place, and without her to provide moral and nutritional guidance, Rafferty took the kids to McDonald's, and they ate their recommended allowance of fat for the decade. On the walk home, he told them the story about the Three Little Pigs, changing it so it ended with a recipe for roast pork. Superman thought the new ending was funny. Miaow didn't.

  Rafferty talked them through the crowded sidewalk, improvising a plan to write a fairy-tale cookbook: soap-flavored bread crumbs that children could drop behind them in the woods without the birds eating them, a low-calorie gingerbread house, a wolf's stew with boiled grandmother. Superman made a few contributions, but Miaow walked silently between them. When Rafferty laughed aloud at something the boy suggested, she moved around to Rafferty's other side, so he was in the middle. Accepting the hint, Rafferty let his hand drop lightly onto the back of the boy's neck. Superman gave a tiny start and stopped talking in midword, but he did not move away, and a moment later he picked up where he'd left off.

  Rafferty felt like he'd just won a marathon.

  They got home and settled happily in the living room, although it felt a little emptier without Rose. Miaow began to cut out the figures from her drawings and paste them together in new combinations, and Rafferty suffered a few more grueling defeats at Tetris. At nine o'clock he put the kids to bed and curled up on the couch with his gun.

  He decided he'd had a wonderful day.

  Surfacing abruptly from sleep, he answers the wrong phone first, saying hello to the dial tone while the cell phone continues to bleat from across the room. The only light is the city's diffuse glow through the sliding glass door, and he barks his shin on the corner of the coffee table on his way to grab the phone.

  "Hello." He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to focus his attention.

  There is a silence. He thinks he can hear traffic in the background.

  "Hello," he says again. "What time is it anyway?"

  After a moment a woman's voice says, "Three."

  It is an unfamiliar voice, self-possessed and pleasant but reserved, as though its owner is unsure whether to say anything more. Rafferty has t
o relax his hand on the phone. He is gripping it tightly enough to snap the hinge.

  "Hello, Doughnut," he says.

  At first he thinks she will hang up, but then she says, "Why did I keep the disks?" To his surprise, her English is excellent.

  "Because you're on them," Rafferty says. He grabs a breath and makes the leap he has been considering ever since "You and your sister."

  He hears a short, reflexive grunt, as though someone has poked her in the gut. "You looked at the others."

  "Yes."

  "Did you enjoy them?" She drags out the word as though it exerts friction in her throat.

  "They're the worst things I ever saw. They set a whole new standard for awful."

  "You had to be there," she says. "You want to talk to me. Talk."

  "Face-to-face."

  "Why?"

  "I want to see you. I need to see who you are."

  "I'm a girl," she says. "There's nothing unusual about me."

  "Oh," Rafferty says, "I think there is."

  A siren goes by in the background, and a moment later he hears it in the street below. She is very near.

  "I'll call you," she says. The line goes dead.

  Rafferty tiptoes down the hall and looks into Miaow's room. Both children are out cold, the boy snoring softly in the top bunk. His sheet, as always, is on the floor. Rafferty covers him gently and goes into his own room to get dressed.

  Silom Road is dark and deserted and insubstantial, the bustle and energy of the day long behind. Shop windows are dim. The neon signs are just drab squiggles in glass. The few lighted windows are five or six stories up, where apartment dwellers face their own sleepless nights. He walks several blocks, looking for a pay phone, before he decides that the quality of the connection made it more likely Doughnut was using a cellular. He keeps walking, aimlessly now, covering another block or two before a tuk-tuk pulls optimistically to the curb, although he has not signaled it.

  "Where?" the driver says, gunning the motor happily. He is chubby and cheerful-looking, with a fat mole on his chin that sprouts black hairs long enough for knot practice. The Buddha's belly below the handlebars is tightly sheathed in a T-shirt covered in children's handprints in bright primary colors.

  When the Buddha sends you a tuk-tuk, Rafferty thinks, it's probably a sign that you should go somewhere. "That way." He indicates the direction in which he is walking and climbs in. The driver pops the clutch, and Rafferty's back slams the back of the seat.

  As he accelerates, the driver catches Rafferty studying his face in the rearview mirror and gives him a grin that is extremely rich in gums. "Where we go, boss?"

  "Suppose I killed somebody," Rafferty says, watching the man's grin slip. "Where would I put the body?"

  He gets a quick lift of the head: The answer is obvious. "Klong Toey. Everybody use Klong Toey."

  "But the police would find it if I left it in Klong Toey."

  The man purses his lips. "River," he says.

  Rafferty says, "But where? Somebody would see me if I dropped it over a bridge."

  "Small soi, not so many houses. Better than a bridge."

  "Show me."

  "How many place you want to see?"

  "How many can you show me?"

  A shrug. "Ten, fifteen."

  "How do you know where they are?"

  "Police find a body," the driver says. "Everybody comes to look. They need tuk-tuks."

  "Okay, show me the best place. Near Pratunam."

  Within twenty minutes Rafferty has seen six places, all within an easy drive from Claus Ulrich's apartment, from which a weighted body could have been dropped into the Chao Phraya unobserved. He and the driver sit musing, the little two-stroke engine popping away, as the river glides by, its waters a thick reddish brown, opaque with silt carried down from the north. There could be a sunken city two feet beneath the surface, Rafferty thinks, and no one would ever know it. Cup water in your hands and you couldn't see your palms.

  "He was a very big man," he says aloud, without realizing he is speaking.

  "Wrap him in a big sheet," the driver suggests. He became voluble when he realized Rafferty could speak Thai, and he has entered completely into the spirit of this hypothetical murder. He twists the hairs growing out of his mole as inspiration strikes. "Dye it black so you can carry it at night."

  "That's good, but getting him here…She's just one woman, and I don't think she's a big one."

  The driver pulls a packet of Krong Thip cigarettes from his shirt pocket and fires one up. "Cut him in pieces."

  The stains on the bathroom floor. "Make four or five trips carrying an arm, a leg? That's a lot of back-and-forth. Somebody would notice."

  "Boyfriend," the driver proposes instantly. "Kill fat husband, get help from skinny boyfriend."

  "Could be." Up until now he has always seen Doughnut acting alone. On the other hand, there were the four men who beat him up in the soi.

  There is a pause while they both think, and then the driver says, "Good man, bad man?"

  "Very bad man."

  The driver's face glows red from the coal on his cigarette. "So no problem. One bad person dead. Plenty left."

  This is an argument Rafferty has been getting a lot of. "Let's go home." He is suddenly light-headed from lack of sleep. He has a disorienting sensation of motion, as though the river were still and they were gliding sideways.

  By the time he walks into the apartment, it is four-thirty. The kids are still asleep, Superman's sheet once more on the floor. He picks it up and covers the boy again, and Superman stirs and his eyes half open. Rafferty is startled by how fast he moves. Within less than a second, he is curled against the wall, knees drawn up protectively, glaring at Rafferty. His teeth are bared.

  "No problem," Rafferty says. He takes a step back. "You dropped your sheet."

  The boy looks down at the sheet and then up at Rafferty. The tautness slowly goes out of his face, and he nods. He covers himself and stretches out again but keeps his eyes open and fixed on Rafferty's face.

  "Go to sleep," Rafferty says, in what he hopes is a fatherly tone. He leaves the room and closes the door all the way so Superman can hear the latch click home.

  He makes a silent cup of Nescafe and sips at it. Grim as sin. The Nescafe performs the desired sabotage on his central nervous system, and Madame Wing makes an unexpected appearance in his mind's eye.

  What had she looked like when she was younger? She is thin in a way that says she has never been fat: she has the gauntness of someone whose appetites have nothing to do with food. She would have had those terrifying eyes even then, set into a face that was young and old at the same time; she would never have shone with the soft flush of youth. Even at eighteen, he thinks, she would look like someone who had never been out of doors, who had never shared a secret, who had never lost her heart. She has the face of an animal with multiple sets of teeth.

  A whole new kind of hatred, Arthit had said. Collect ten million baht, shred it, and return it, just to cause her pain. The pain more important than the profit.

  Claus Ulrich had probably inspired a new kind of hatred, too.

  He is assuming Ulrich is dead.

  Suppose he's not, though. Uncle Claus has demonstrated a talent for living inconspicuously, although his weight makes him a conspicuous man. But if a ghost were to appear from his past, a grown and dangerous version of someone he never thought could be a threat to him, someone he saw as a passive object, to be tormented at will-what would he do? Wouldn't a man like Claus Ulrich have a bolt-hole handy in case someone like Doughnut did appear? Or would he even recognize her? Twenty years in the same city is a long time, no matter how reclusive you are. He could have encountered dozens of them by now, grown up beyond recognition.

  But they would remember him.

  Five cups of coffee later, Rafferty is still on the couch, Miaow has left for school, and the phone finally rings. He grabs the receiver, expecting it to be Doughnut. Instead it is Arthit.
<
br />   "Get a motorcycle taxi," he says. "Take your cell phone. Your guard is on the move."

  34

  An Unusually Spiritual Attitude in a Thief

  The motorcycle hits a pothole, and Rafferty is momentarily weightless. Then, as he hits the seat, he emphatically isn't.

  "We're turning," Rafferty's motorcycle driver shouts into the wind blowing over his shoulder. "Hang on."

  For a long, stomach-sinking moment, Rafferty has the sensation of being almost parallel to the surface of the road as the tires squeal, slide sickeningly, and grip again. Then they are upright, and he focuses on the spots of light doing a Busby Berkeley number behind his closed eyelids. The cell phone pasted to his ear is slick with sweat.

  "How far from Sukhumvit Soi 28?" Rafferty asks his driver.

  "Three or four minutes."

  He opens his eyes in time to see the gray iron wall of a truck's side inches from his elbow.

  Rafferty has promised the driver two thousand baht for speed, an exorbitant sum, and the bike is at full throttle. Rush-hour cars and trucks hurtle by in a blur or loom massively in front of them, slipping past at the last possible second by a few slim inches. He has a vision of himself spread across the roadway like peanut butter. A blind man could follow them by listening to the horns.

  He forces himself to look past the traffic and focus on a more distant blur that resolves itself into shop fronts: tailors' shops, jewelry stores, a coffin maker, a watch shop called Lovely Hours, a sign that says, in English, WE HAVE ALL KINDS GRIT. In other words, a typical Bangkok block. "Can we go any faster?"

  The driver starts to turn his head and thinks better of it. "You're joking."

  "He still hasn't looked back," Cho says through the cell phone.

  "We're almost there," Rafferty says. "Just keep him in sight." They hurtle past a sedan, children's startled hands and faces pressed to the windows watching the crazy farang and his driver trying to kill themselves.