A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "Fine," the boy says.

  "Nobody can really answer that question. Why am I lucky? I don't know. I've never gone hungry, I've got both arms and legs. You've had a shitty life, and I don't understand that either. Rose would say it's karma, but I don't understand much about karma. So do I know why you had to be the one that man treated that way? No. I can't explain how the guy handcuffed to my bed could have gone through what he went through either, so I'm a complete bust. By the way, you were wrong about him. He wasn't one of the ones who did all that. He was one of the ones it was done to."

  Superman ducks his head awkwardly, and Rafferty knows that it is all the apology the boy will make.

  "Anyway," Rafferty says, backtracking, "you're here now. Al's not. Who knows? Maybe he died of blood poisoning. Maybe the tsunami got him. But you're here. And you're wrong about why you're here. We didn't just give it all to you. If you hadn't been a good kid, I'd have bathed you and debugged you and thrown you back on the sidewalk, no matter what Miaow said."

  The boy mumbles something to the carpet.

  "Say what?"

  "Not good. Me."

  "Oh, shut up," Rafferty says. "I know enough about you to know you're a great kid. So you bit a guy's ear off." He can hardly believe he's saying the words. "He had it coming. It wasn't your fault. You're smart, you're tough, you're self-sufficient, you're brave, you can fix anything…" He runs out of steam, hearing the hollowness of his words.

  The silence stretches between them, and the boy offers him a way out of it. "I fixed the lock on Miaow's closet door."

  This is real news. "Really? It's not permanently locked anymore? She can close it?"

  "No problem." The boy glances up at him. He is on safer ground. "What did you do when she closed it before?"

  "Took it off the hinges," Rafferty says, happy to have a question he can answer.

  The boy lowers his face and makes a sound that could be a snicker. "The hinges," he says.

  "See? You can do things I can't. I can do things you can't. That means we can do things for each other, doesn't it?"

  A dismissive shake of the head. "Yeah, yeah." The boy puts a hand down in preparation to get up.

  "Hey. You started this. I'm not exactly an expert on life, but you asked me a question and I think you ought to sit here until I finish making a fool out of myself."

  The boy doesn't respond, but he remains seated.

  "Look, the world is softer for some people than others. That's the way it is. Some people don't have enough to eat, some weigh three hundred pounds. And you, you got a really shitty deal. Okay, that's too bad. We all agree, it's just terrible. It absolutely keeps me awake nights." His tone brings the boy's head up sharply. "So what can you do? You can't change the world, you know. It's too damn big. So what does that leave?"

  The boy says nothing, just sits cross-legged with both palms pressed to the carpet, his fingers splayed like those of a runner about to start a sprint.

  "I hate to give advice, so I'll tell you a story instead. It's a Tibetan Buddhist story. A young monk goes to the wisest man he knows, the abbot of his temple, and asks the same question you've just asked: Why is the world so hard and sharp? Why does it have to hurt my feet? And instead of answering, the abbot asks the kid whether it would be better if the world were covered with leather-have you heard this?"

  The boy shakes his head.

  "Okay, so the young monk says sure it would. It'd be a lot better. And the abbot asks the kid whether he knows how to cover the world with leather, and the kid says no, of course he doesn't, because he's a smart kid, a realistic kid. There's no way he can cover the world with leather. 'Fine,' says the abbot. 'Can you cover your feet with leather?'"

  Superman's eyes lift slowly to study the wall above Rafferty's head. After a long moment, he nods once. "Then what?" he asks.

  "Then we're going to get you into a school," Rafferty says. "And you're going to hate it sometimes, because you're just going to be a kid, not someone who runs things, but you're going to stay there because you belong there. Nobody's giving you anything. You'll earn it by being a good, smart kid and by showing up every day and by staying away from yaa baa and glue and whatever the hell else you were stuffing into your system. And if you screw up, you know what? There's not going to be a net. You're just going to fall. We can help you, but only if you want it. If you don't want it badly enough to pay for it, there's nothing anybody can do."

  "You can do this? You can get me into a school?"

  "No problem." Rafferty replays his conversation with Morrison in his mind. "I think."

  "You'll try?"

  This is not something to take lightly, and he pauses long enough to feel the boy's eyes on him. "I promise."

  "Why?" He still has his hands braced on the floor, as though he is ready to bolt from the room.

  "Because Miaow loves you. Because you helped her."

  The boy looks away, out through the sliding glass door at the lights of Bangkok. His body is very still.

  "And because I think you're a terrific kid," Rafferty adds awkwardly.

  The boy says, without turning, "And you don't want anything?"

  "I want you to work. I want you to do whatever you have to do to put leather on your feet so you can step on the sharp stuff without hurting yourself."

  The boy gets up, all in one motion. Rafferty can remember being that limber, but not for quite a while. Superman puts both hands in his pockets and stares at the floor. Then he takes a slow step and then another, toward the hallway. At the last moment, he detours toward the couch. Without looking at Rafferty, he pulls one hand from his pocket and reaches out and touches him on the shoulder lightly, just brushes him with the backs of his fingers.

  As he goes down the hall, Rafferty hears him say, "The hinges."

  PART IV

  The Heart

  38

  She Gets Sold to Someone Who Wants Her Dead

  In the bland light of a restaurant, Toadface and Skeletor look more like regular cops and less like something that escaped from one of Raskolnikov's nightmares. They even have nicknames: Toadface is Chut and Skeletor, for some reason, calls himself Nick.

  "Khmer Rouge," Chut says without enthusiasm. Nick, in defiance of the no-smoking ban recently imposed in Bangkok restaurants, lights his second cigarette in five minutes. Rafferty doesn't like the smoke, but at least it keeps the man's hands above the table.

  "Big-time Khmer Rouge," Rafferty says. "Should be worth a lot."

  Nick snorts a stream of smoke, nicotine disdain, and Chut says, "Shows what you know."

  Rafferty feels a surge of homicidal anger and waits it out. "Okay, well, you guys are the experts. But a lot of people would like to see her dead."

  "That doesn't make them millionaires." Chut looks down at Nick's pack of cigarettes and pushes it halfway across the table and out of reach, and Nick speaks the second word Rafferty has heard him utter. He says, "Hey."

  "So get a pool together. Everybody chips in. Show some fucking creativity."

  Chut puts two hands on the tablecloth and, with some difficulty, laces his fat little fingers together. "And you think this lets you off the hook."

  "What I think is that Clarissa brought about six thousand to Bangkok and you guys got more than half of that. She's been living here ever since-what? About ten days? Figure it out. She's got maybe fifteen hundred dollars left. I'm offering you this person on a silver platter. Should be worth ten times that."

  "What's her name?"

  Rafferty waits until the waitress puts two bowls of rice and some fish in front of Chut and Nick and a couple of scrambled eggs in front of him. He continues to wait until she has returned to pour coffee for him and Chut. Nick is drinking something that looks a lot like a tequila sunrise.

  "You get the name, plus the address and a floor plan of the house, when we have a deal," Rafferty says. "You can find customers?"

  Chut says something with his mouth full. Rafferty can't catch the words, but the gis
t seems to be "piece of cake." The man swallows, and says, "Just for the hell of it, what's the deal?"

  Rafferty takes a deep breath. This is not a position he ever expected to be in. "One: She gets sold to someone who wants her dead. Two: Your problem with me is over. Three: I get one-fifth of whatever you sell her for." He has a use in mind for the money, especially since Madame Wing won't be making her second payment.

  Nick laughs. It starts out like a snake's hiss and turns into a cough. Chut says, "You've got balls, I'll give you that."

  "I got off on the wrong foot with you guys," Rafferty says. "Not my fault, not your fault. I'm just trying to make it right."

  "And pocket a little money." Chut picks up his bowl in both hands and drains whatever liquid was at the bottom. "One-seventh," he says. Rafferty pushes back his chair and starts to rise. "Okay, okay. One-fifth."

  "Done." He sits again, gives them Keck's address, and describes the layout of the house and grounds. Then he hands over a plan of the first floor, drawn from memory. The thin one, Nick, listens with his eyes closed, his upper lip grasped between his teeth. Chut takes notes in an elegantly leather-bound booklet. Rafferty finishes and waits for questions.

  When one comes, it comes from Nick. "How do you know you can trust us for the money?"

  "Oh, please," Rafferty says, getting up again. "You're Bangkok's finest."

  On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, he watches until the two of them are out of sight, trying to rationalize away the uneasiness he feels about having ordered someone's death as casually as if it had been on the menu. When he turns, he bumps against someone. Looking down, he sees the dark little man from the soi, the one who had hit him with the gun. Behind him are his three teammates. One of them-the man whose nose Rafferty tried to drive into his brain-is wearing a raccoon's mask that resolves itself into two black eyes that look borrowed from a cartoon. A long swelling, big enough to hide a baguette in, runs across his forehead, just above the eyebrows.

  "Someone needs to talk to you," the little man says. His right hand disappears into a small leather tote bag, secured by a shoulder strap. Protruding an inch or two from a hole cut into the side of the bag, a few inches from Rafferty's belly, is the barrel of a gun.

  Rafferty says, "It took her long enough."

  39

  Just a Flower Seller

  The fragrance of the flowers is so overpowering, Rafferty thinks, that it ought to tint the air-perhaps salmon, with halos of pink around the naked bulbs dangling from the bare electrical cords high overhead. The perfume seems thick enough to foam around his feet as he pushes his way through it, with two of the men in front of him and two behind.

  There are obviously people here and there, but none in sight. The rows of flowers are too high, the aisles between them too narrow. He can hear voices occasionally, the energetic back-and-forth of bargaining, frequent bursts of laughter.

  The five of them stop in front of a volcano of orchids taller than Rafferty. The small dark man, who has been directly behind Rafferty, steps forward and puts out a hand. He looks almost apologetic.

  "Skip it," Rafferty says.

  "Those are the rules."

  "Make new ones."

  The man takes the gun from his bag, shows it to Rafferty, then drops it back in and zips the bag tightly shut. He walks several yards away and places the bag on a display table beneath a spray of exotic flowers that look like they evolved to snatch bats in midflight. Then he comes back and raises his arms to shoulder height, inviting Rafferty to pat him down. "Do you want to check us? Lift your shirts," he says to the others.

  "Skip it. So I can see you haven't got guns? You'll have one when I give you mine, won't you?"

  "Look around," the small man says. "This is a public place. Everybody in Bangkok who wants flowers is here."

  "Compromise," Rafferty says. He slides the automatic free of his trousers, pops the clip, and hands the clip to the small dark man. Holding the gun between thumb and forefinger, he lets it dangle harmlessly in the air. "That's the only clip," he says. "Trust me."

  "I don't actually have to." The dark man hikes his pant leg to show Rafferty a small automatic tucked into an ankle holster and then he grins like a small boy doing a magic trick.

  "On the other hand," Rafferty says, bringing the barrel of the gun up beneath the man's chin, "there's still the one under the hammer. Jesus. Every time you think mankind has evolved, you get slapped in the face with a dead fish."

  "Tell me about it," says a voice from behind him. A woman.

  "Soon as he gives me his gun."

  She sighs. "Do you really think we'd bring you here to kill you?"

  "It doesn't seem efficient. If I know anything about you, it's that you're efficient."

  "You came all this way," Doughnut says, with the sorely tried air of someone forced to state the obvious. "We might as well talk."

  "The clip," Rafferty says. "These things cost money."

  The man slowly hands it over, watches with total concentration as Rafferty slips the clip back in and secures the automatic beneath his waistband. Then he nods, and Rafferty turns to face Doughnut.

  At first glance she is completely unremarkable, someone he would pass on the street and not remember a moment later. He would put her in her forties, but he knows she can't be. The photos on the missing disks were taken toward the end of the eighties, and she must have been ten to twelve at the time, like the other children in the AT Series. She can't be much older than twenty-nine or thirty. After what she has lived through, he thinks, she should look eighty.

  Shoulder-length hair, painstakingly parted and brushed, frames a round, somewhat flat face with the low nose and full lips of Isaan. Her skin is dark, unlightened by makeup, its duskiness emphasized by a fine white scar that runs the length of her chin, the result of a slicing wound. She wears the prim pastel clothes of an office lady, a bank teller, someone with a job in the safe world.

  The eyes don't look at the safe world. They are black, the purest, deepest black, and they seem to be set several inches behind the face, like those of someone holding up a costume mask and peering through it. Someone with a lot of practice at estimating arm's reach and staying outside it.

  She submits patiently to his gaze and then gives him a perfunctory smile that tells him he's looked long enough. "Just a flower seller."

  "You're just a flower seller," Rafferty says, "in the same way Joan of Arc was just a farm girl."

  She turns without a word and leads him down the aisle, the four men trailing behind, Joan of Arc's soldiers in T-shirts and plastic flip-flops. They make two turns, and Rafferty has no idea what direction they're going in.

  "Here," Doughnut says. They have reached a rickety structure, roughly square and no more than ten feet on a side, framed in unfinished lumber. Chicken wire nailed to the uprights turns it into a cage of sorts. A table, four feet square and topped with scarred plywood, tilts alarmingly in the center of the cage. Flowers stretch away in all directions, sullen smears of color. Doughnut opens a plywood door and stands aside. "Okay?"

  "And if it weren't?" She follows him in without answering. "Your office?"

  "Might be, might not be." She closes the door and takes the seat nearest it. Rafferty takes the seat opposite and sees that the open door concealed a television set wired to a VCR.

  "So you're Poke," Doughnut says when she is settled. She beats a quick tattoo on the tabletop with her fingernails. "And you think I'm going to tell you my story."

  "It's me or the police." He places a hand on the table, and it dips a couple of inches and rocks up again. One leg too short.

  She leans back and puts one arm up, over the back of her chair. "Why would I be afraid of the police?"

  He sits opposite her. His chair rocks, too. "Because you killed Claus Ulrich."

  Doughnut looks like she is stifling a yawn. "You can prove this?"

  "I don't have to. You were there. You disappeared. You left bloodstains. You were in the pictures. For
the cops that's a royal flush: means, motive, opportunity."

  A golden box of Dunhill cigarettes appears on the table, along with a slender silver lighter, either a Mark Cross or a good knockoff. "The police don't actually need anything. They just manufacture what they don't have." She flips the box open, one-handed. "Why would my story interest you?"

  "Because a nice lady came all the way from Australia to learn what happened to Claus, and I told her I'd find out."

  She lights up and plumes smoke from her nostrils. "The famous niece, I suppose." She rolls the tip of her cigarette gently on the plywood surface of the table to remove a film of ash. The corners of her mouth go down, her first overt display of emotion. "So she asked you. And you always do what you say you'll do?"

  "It makes it easier to get up in the morning."

  The four men are arrayed behind her, tallest to shortest, as though they've lined up for a photo, peering in through the chicken wire. She turns to see what he is looking at and waves the men away with the hand holding the cigarette. They melt like gnomes into the flowers. Several moments pass, measured in exhalations of smoke. "Let's see," she says at last. "I have a question for you first. Do you think murder is a crime?"

  After the week he has had, there is only one truthful reply. "I used to."

  She gazes at the cigarette, turning it in her hand so she can read the gold writing on the filter. "If I killed Claus Ulrich, was that a crime?"

  "I saw the pictures," he says.

  "So what you're saying is, I tell you my story and then wait while you decide my fate."

  Rafferty shifts in the hard chair. "I'm not really comfortable with playing judge."

  She smiles slightly at the evasion. "But that's what you're doing."

  "I think I'd like a cigarette." He hasn't smoked in almost a year.

  She extends the pack and the lighter. "This makes you nervous?" She is very calm.