A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "I'd smoke used toilet paper to get rid of the smell of these flowers."

  "Too much of anything will make you sick," she says. "Unless you're already sick, of course." She watches him light up. The lighter is a real Mark Cross. He turns it over and sees the initials "C.U." engraved in a flowing script, fancy as a minaret. "It was his," she says.

  Rafferty turns the lighter over in his hand. "You left an awful lot there. Money, watches, all sorts of stuff. Why take this?"

  "I didn't want anything he'd touched. But he used this." Her gaze floats over his left shoulder, unfocused. "Do you remember the red candles?"

  "I'll remember them my whole life." The flame haloed in the photographs, the spills of hot wax across the children's abdomens.

  "So will I. So will Toom." She meets his eyes and gives him the perfunctory smile again. "My older sister. Toom."

  "How did he get his hands on you?"

  She regards him for a moment as though he is a distance she will have to cross, and then she sighs. "My mother sold us when I was ten and Toom was twelve," she says. "A lady came from Bangkok and promised my mother she could find us good work in the city. Washing dishes in a restaurant, she said. When we got bigger, we could be waitresses, with uniforms, two for each of us. She showed my mother a big color picture of the uniform. How I wanted to wear those clothes. I still remember exactly what they looked like." She draws a finger down the scar on her chin, and Rafferty would bet she doesn't know she's doing it. "The lady told my mother we could make two or three hundred dollars a month in the restaurant. My father didn't earn two hundred dollars in a year. She offered an advance on our salary. Is any of this new to you?"

  People are beginning to move past them, choosing the blooms they will sell in the shops, in the streets. They glance incuriously at the two of them, just a farang and a Thai woman, having a conversation, probably bargaining over the price of flowers. "I know about it in the abstract, as something that happens. As a personal story, it's new."

  "I'm aware it's not original. The same thing happened to the other girls in the house."

  "What house?"

  She shakes her head impatiently. "The one that wasn't a restaurant. Everything that happened to any of us happened to all of us."

  Rafferty tries to keep the revulsion out of his voice. "You were ten."

  "Almost eleven. And it hurt more than I could believe. But not for long, at least, you know, not down there. I didn't stay eleven for long either. It was interesting. In no time at all, I was older than my sister. Even though she was twelve. She was the one who kept crying. I was the one who decided, as you Americans like to say, 'Fuck this.'"

  "You tried to escape?"

  "Of course. The first time I didn't even get out of the building. They used wet towels on us. No marks, you see. Customers don't like scarred girls. They hit us until their arms got tired, and then they gave up. Just locked us up. Toom hadn't tried to get away, but they beat her anyway, just to show me what would happen if I did it again."

  There is heat inside Rafferty's chest. "Who were they?"

  "Two Chinese men. Lee and Kwan. They were brothers and they owned the house, the restaurant, everything. They owned us. After they beat Toom, I decided to wait. I realized I could wait. I learned to live through things. To look at the ceiling, as long as they left me on my back. When they didn't, I looked at the wall, or the floor, or the pillow, if I was someplace fancy enough to have pillows."

  "How long did this go on?"

  "A year, three months, and two days. I was marking the days on the floor under the bed with a pen I had brought with me from my village. My mother had bought it for me so I could write down people's orders in the restaurant. I was going to smile at them and nod and write down their orders exactly right. They were going to love me."

  She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she is gazing at the cigarette in her hand. "Then Claus came along."

  Rafferty can see no change in her face, but she has sunk the fingernails of her left hand into the edge of the table. There are bands of white around the knuckles. He waits.

  A deep drag, two jets of smoke. "He didn't look any worse than anybody else until I realized that the other girls were hiding. They had disappeared through the doors. Behind the sofa. One of the girls who couldn't get out of the room pissed her pants right there."

  "He took you."

  She shakes her head. "Actually, that time he took her. Her mistake. He liked piss." She sees him looking at her hand and relaxes it. "He liked pretty much everything, as long as it hurt or humiliated us. I figured out later that what really interested him was hurting us inside. It wasn't enough that we'd bled and been burned and pissed on. We had to feel like we were shit. We had to want to stop living. Some of us tried to."

  The scars on Toom's wrist, Rafferty thinks but does not say. Something Chouk Ran said comes to mind. "He put a nail through your heart."

  She looks at him, startled. "Yes," she says. "And the person who got up from that bed was never the same again." She passes her fingertips over her cheeks as though she was spreading makeup. "But I didn't know that until he took me." She drops her hand to the table, slides open the pack of cigarettes and extracts one, lights it off the butt in her hand, and drops the butt to the floor. "And I'm not going to talk about it. I promised myself, after I finished with him, that I would never talk about it again. Never think about it again. It was all I'd thought about for most of my life, do you realize that? Most of my fucking life I've been thinking about Claus Ulrich. Anyway, you saw the pictures of the others. There was nothing special about me. It all happened, and it all hurt, and it all took forever, and that's all there was to it, except that he took me again and then again. He was thinking up new things. That's what I thought at the time anyway. It wasn't until years later, when I opened his filing cabinets and saw the videos, that I realized he wasn't even a creative pervert. He just imitated the stuff he imported from Japan."

  Her hair, there is something about her hair.

  "Such a dull, ordinary man," she says. "You expect beasts to be different, but they're not. They're as boring as everybody else."

  "You can't tell anything about anybody," Rafferty says. "You, for instance. Looking at you, no one would ever guess what you've survived." He is studying her hair, the perfection with which it has been brushed. Something stirs inside him.

  "Then he took both of us," she says. She watches him for a reaction. "Sisters. Some men like sisters, you know? They like them-together. He made us do things to each other. Sex things. Then…" She falters. Looks down at her lap. He sees that the part in her hair is straight enough to have been cut with a knife.

  Like Miaow's.

  The perfection of Miaow's part is one of the ways she proves she can control things. He mentally waves the image away, but it persists. "Then what?"

  "Then this," she says. "This is something you haven't seen."

  She swivels in her chair and turns on the television set. It blossoms into electronic snow until she pushes a button on the remote. "He took a few of these," she says, waiting for the picture. "But the camera was too bulky, and he couldn't work it with a remote, so he had to stop playing with us to make the video." The familiar room blinks onto the screen. "But he took this one because it was special."

  The image is mercifully low-resolution, the product of a cheap video camera from more than twenty years ago. A small naked brown girl, barely recognizable as Doughnut, is on the red coverlet. Her wrists have been tied to her ankles, which are separated by metal cuffs with a two-foot rod between them. The bindings open and lift her legs and arms, leaving her splayed and helpless on her back.

  A slightly larger girl, also naked, enters the picture from the left. She is already crying.

  "Toom," Doughnut says.

  Toom sits on the bed next to Doughnut and gently reaches over to smooth her sister's hair, which is plastered with sweat to her face. The camera jumps, and Toom yanks her arm back as though Doughn
ut were a live wire. Then, jerkily, the camera moves in on the two girls. Doughnut has her eyes closed, and her face is vacant, almost otherworldly, but Toom watches with enormous eyes as the camera advances on her.

  A hand comes into the frame, holding a lighted cigar. The hand is shaking, and Rafferty realizes that the camera is shaking, too. Claus Ulrich is excited.

  Toom waves the cigar away and hangs her head. The hand disappears and comes back without the cigar, and then it moves too fast for the camera to track and backhands Toom across the face. Toom's face snaps around, the short hair flying, and she is knocked sideways across Doughnut. Doughnut's eyes remain closed. When the hand reenters the frame, it has the cigar in it again.

  Without opening her eyes, Doughnut says something to her sister.

  This time, very slowly, Toom takes it. With the cigar pressed between the first and second fingers of her right hand, she does the best she can to make a very high wai to her sister, who has opened her eyes.

  Doughnut smiles at her.

  "Turn it off," Rafferty says. His voice is a rasp. He has looked away from the screen, but he doesn't even want the images in his peripheral vision.

  "It goes on for quite a while," Doughnut says, snapping the set off. "Although at the time it seemed much longer."

  Rafferty reaches reflexively for another cigarette, catches himself.

  "So, two nights later, I broke a window and went out through it. Cut myself here." She swipes at the scar on her chin. "I had to do it, for Toom. She hadn't stopped crying since she hurt me. I thought she was going to cry herself to death. I couldn't help her while I was inside, so I got out. My first night out, I met Coke on the street."

  "Coke?"

  "The short one," she says, indicating the vanished men with her chin. "He was little, but he liked me, and he helped me. And he had something I needed."

  "What?" Coke and Doughnut.

  "A gun." She brings the black eyes up to his, as though to make sure he is listening. "I had to get Toom out, so I needed a gun. I didn't know they had cut her to get even with me for escaping. Cut her here." She raises a leg and draws a quick line across her Achilles tendon.

  The flopping foot. "Who did?"

  "The two Chinese men."

  "I'm surprised you didn't go after them, too."

  Doughnut stubs out her half-smoked cigarette on the tabletop, being very careful to fold it over neatly before she drops it on the floor. She looks down at it and twists her shoe on it, killing it dead.

  "Well, sure," Rafferty says. Despite his mounting revulsion-at what he has seen, at what she has done-he can't help seeing her as Miaow grown up, a Miaow for whom things had gone differently, things over which she had no control. The plain brown face, the dark hair, the knife-edge part. He realizes she is talking.

  "…finally, Lee, the one who liked to beat the girls, drove her out and took her to a number hotel, and I got off Coke's motorcycle and walked into the parking lot, just as Lee got out of the car. I shot him there, and we took Toom. When I saw her foot, I decided to kill Kwan, too." She lets her chin fall onto her chest, the first time she has betrayed anything like exhaustion. "And I did, about eight months later." She sounds as calm as someone describing what she had for dinner. "A week after my twelfth happy birthday. Then I went off with Toom and Coke, and we made a life."

  As she describes it, it had not been a conventional household. Coke robbed people and sent Doughnut to school with the money he stole, while Toom kept house. Doughnut learned English and computer skills and thought about Claus.

  "How did you find him?"

  "I didn't. I just saw him on the street. Big as ever. Just walking along, like a real person. You want to hear something funny? I was terrified." She brings her right hand to her heart and taps, twice. "Terrified. He was exactly the same. He looked at me like I wasn't there, and I realized he didn't know who I was. I smiled at him." She fiddles with the package of cigarettes and then pushes it aside. "I think that was the hardest thing, that smile, that I ever did. He nodded and walked right past. So I turned around and followed him, and then I knew where he lived. Easy. I could hardly believe it."

  "I think I know some of the rest of it," Rafferty says. He tells her what he has learned about Noot and Bangkok Domestics and Madame Wing. "So you got in, and there you were. In that apartment. Just you and Claus."

  She nods. Then she reaches up and smooths her hair.

  "How did you stand it?"

  Her fingers find the cigarettes again, and she takes one out without looking at it. "No problem. It was almost fun. I was nice to him. I cooked and cleaned and took care of him like he was a big, fat, ugly, smelly baby. He stank of meat. He had hair on his back, like a monkey. He poured sweet stuff all over himself because he smelled so bad. I told him he was handsome. Why do men always believe they are handsome? I made him love me. He called me his little sugar doughnut." She spits the English words like hard seeds, as though she expects them to bounce on the table. "I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to think I loved him. Like Toom loved me, like somebody sometime must have loved all those girls he hurt. It was necessary for him to think I loved him."

  "Because it wasn't enough just to kill him."

  She places the unlit cigarette between her index fingers as though she is measuring it and looks at him over it. "Would you think it was enough?"

  Rafferty does not answer, just regards the small, dark, harmless-looking girl sitting opposite him in her pastel clothes. Looks at the clean, cropped nails; the bright, childish plastic bracelet; the meticulously brushed hair. Looks at the child tied to the bed. Doughnut.

  Who could have been Miaow.

  She returns his gaze impassively and lets the cigarette fall to the table. "Well, it wasn't. First he had to trust me. Then he had to love me. Then he had to do something good, just once in his life."

  "He already had," Rafferty says. "Clarissa. The niece."

  She moves her head to one side, dodging the words. "For me. He had to do something for me, so he could feel good about himself. Feel good about being alive."

  "Jesus," Rafferty says.

  "So I borrowed money from him. I told him my family needed it, which was true. I gave him some time to feel what it was like to be good, to be proud of himself. I gave him a week, thanked him every day. Told him he had saved my mama's life by buying medicine for her. He was so proud of himself that he went on a diet. Then I fell in my bathroom. I screamed. He ran in to help me. Feeling like a hero. I'd thought about where to do it while I polished all that furniture. I needed him to be in the bathroom."

  "For cleanup." He is watching her eyes, trying to see the person behind them. Only when she catches him and glances down does he see a crack in the surface, a vulnerability in the shell.

  She does not look back up. "He lifted me off the floor and sat me on the edge of the tub, and I shot him in the leg. Then I shot him in the other leg."

  "You were close to him."

  "I wanted to be close. I would have liked to have been inside him, so I could know how much it hurt. After he fell down, I shot him again, very low in the stomach."

  "Ouch," Rafferty says.

  "I stood in the tub, waiting to make sure he couldn't move. His eyes were open, looking at me like I was something he'd never seen before. Something he'd never imagined. I suppose I was. A girl hurting him. I suppose it was something new."

  Rafferty thinks for a moment about what he wants to say. "You can live a long time with a stomach wound."

  "And I let him. I told him all about it. Everything he had done to me." For a moment she seems puzzled, and she looks back up at him with something like an appeal in her eyes. "He didn't remember me. He had me confused with another girl. I'd thought about him every day for years, and he didn't remember me. But when I talked about Toom, about us being sisters, then he remembered. You know what he said?"

  Rafferty discovers that he doesn't really want to know. He lifts a palm.

  "He said, 'Those were good
pictures.' So I shot him in the head."

  She slumps back in her seat. "I was tired," she says. "I didn't mean to let him go that fast."

  Rafferty reaches across the table, picks up the cigarette she dropped, and lights it. Feels the good poison course through him, killing him a little but not quite enough. "Have you ever cried about all this?"

  Her chin comes up and her lips thin, and for a second Rafferty thinks he is seeing the face Ulrich must have seen in his last minutes. "About what happened to you, what happened to Toom. Did you ever take the time to cry over it?"

  "Toom cried," she says flatly. "One of us had to be the dry one. One of us had to do something about it."

  "Then what do you feel? Now that it's over."

  She stretches across, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and puts it between her lips. "I feel like I made a mistake."

  It is not the answer he expects. "You do?"

  "I should have waited. I should have let him lose some more weight on his diet. Take it from me. If you're going to shoot somebody and you have to get rid of the body, choose someone thin."

  "I'll keep it in mind."

  "But I couldn't wait. Do you want to know why?"

  "I think I do," Rafferty says. "He had packed a bag. He was going somewhere, wasn't he? Somewhere where he could get hold of some kids."

  "I'm impressed," she says, not sounding particularly impressed. She looks down at the cigarette. "I miss him, in a way," she says thoughtfully. "He gave me something to do."

  "Can I have the cigarette back?"

  She passes it over to him, shaking her head. "I didn't know I'd taken it."

  "Anybody left?" he asks. She glances up at him, eyebrows raised. "Are you at the end of your list, Doughnut, or is somebody left?"

  Another shake of the head, without much behind it. "Finished."

  "What about the lady who brought you to Bangkok?"

  "That was only business. If I kill everybody who does business, there won't be anybody left. No. They were different. They needed to die."

  Rafferty sucks deeply on the cigarette, replaying the remark in his head. Then he hands the cigarette back to her. He gets up, feeling light-headed and profoundly doubtful about what he is going to do. "Okay."