Across the Deep
Page 14
But his thoughts had immediately frozen when he’d opened the hotel door to find Chakrii sitting on the bed with a gun resting menacingly by his side. Aanwat’s mind immediately began to spin in a new direction.
The man wasn’t someone low down in the organization; he was the boss. Aanwat hadn’t actually spoken to him aside from an initial introduction upon his arrival. Since then, he had seen him at the warehouse by the dock plenty of times, though he’d never dared make eye contact.
And yet here he was, sitting on the bed in Aanwat’s hotel room, and he couldn’t imagine that there could possibly be any positive reason for it. The man terrified Aanwat. Even Chakrii’s expensive tailored suit did little to curb the man’s thug look. His face was broad and flat with a long, jagged scar running down the left side. The remnant of the ragged wound made Aanwat wonder what had happened to the other guy, because surviving a gash like that could only mean that his adversary had ended up dead. He hoped the same thing wasn’t about to happen to him.
He believed Chakrii didn’t actually care about finding Suda, but was in his hotel room, intending to do harm to send a message to Gan. No doubt Chakrii would want to make sure Gan understood that he had to make things right for the sake of honor and the ability to do future business together.
Aanwat’s chest contracted at the realization, but he didn’t want to show how afraid he was. He tried to force his features into a deferential look rather than one that bespoke his fear.
“Sawadee khrup,” Aanwat said, bowing, hands clasped, sweat immediately formed under his arms, and he felt his body tense with stifled fear.
The timing has to be a coincidence, and yet, he could hardly force himself to swallow normally, his fear somehow concentrating in the back of his throat. He can’t possibly know I saw Suda today, Aanwat tried to assure himself. Right?
His palms became clammy, and he desperately wanted to wipe them on his pants but didn’t dare.
He couldn’t help thinking: How could it be a coincidence that Chakrii paid him a visit the very day he had found Suda? Confusion swirled through his mind. Had he been followed? Did they already know where she was and were simply toying with him to determine whether he would give them the information? Or had they stashed her there themselves, and the entire story about the storage container being empty was a lie? His thoughts began to dart to all sorts of scenarios while he worked hard to keep his face looking neutral.
Were they playing some sort of cat-and mouse-game? If so, Aanwat wasn’t at all sure he was going to get out of the situation without giving Suda away.
He felt sweat soaking the underarms of his shirt and was glad his dark blue sweatshirt would hide that fact.
He doesn’t know, he told himself again and looked directly into the boss’s impenetrable, almost black eyes with an air of being on the same side. His sharp face was menacing, and Aanwat’s breathing shallowed as he tried to hide his nervousness. After all, why would they follow him when he was supposed to be the one giving them information?
If he could stay calm, he knew his chances of getting out of the situation were better, so he forced himself to inhale deeply and smile as if he were in complete agreement with the boss. Yes, he said, the situation was ridiculous and, yes, something weird was going on. He threw out the idea of a traitor in the organization working against them because it was the first thing that came to his mind but was surprised when his boss concurred with the possibility.
“You better not be on the wrong side of this,” he said, his eyes icily looking at Aanwat.
“Me? How could I be? I wasn’t here when she went missing.”
Aanwat’s heartbeat raced, and he felt nauseated with fear.
“Humm,” he responded, but Aanwat could tell that his absence from the point of Suda’s disappearance didn’t get him off the hook as a potential traitor.
“Are you police?” he yelled, shocking Aanwat with the abrupt change from the initial soft conversational tone he was taking.
Aanwat’s face paled. “Police? No. How could I be police?”
“Undercover,” he said tightly through thin lips, forcing his tone back down, giving the impression that he was barely keeping himself in check. That violence was a whisper away. Aanwat gasped when the man reached his hand into his pocket, but in place of the knife Aanwat expected, he brought out a business card. He used the edge to clean his thumbnail.
“Thai police you mean?” Aanwat asked. “No,” he stammered. This had gone in an unexpected direction. Was it possible that Thai police and American police were somehow working together to catch them? His mind reeled. “No,” Aanwat said again and raised his hands in surrender. He raised his eyebrows in disbelief and shook his head.
The realization came to him that telling where Suda was at this point would only make him look guilty. As if he had been holding out until he was pressured. How had this all gotten so out of control?
Abruptly the boss heaved himself off of the bed and walked to the door. He stood there for a moment, his back to Aanwat. “You better make sure you don’t have anything to hide,” he said then reached for the doorknob.
“I don’t,” Aanwat’s stammered reply assured him. “You know all there is to know.”
When the door closed behind him, Aanwat heaved a sigh of relief and almost fell onto the bed, his legs devoid of strength.
He hadn’t cracked. And he hadn’t given up Suda’s location. The boss thought he was incompetent and that helped. Aanwat felt incompetent. Certainly he was in way over his head, and he’d found Suda only by happenstance. But, it was clear that Chakrii had no confidence in Aanwat’s ability to come through, which bought him some time.
But the questions had thrown him. He’d blurted out the idea of a traitor only because it had been the first thing that had come to mind in the moment. Maybe there was something amiss, though. It would make a lot of sense. If there was a traitor, who was it? And did he also know where Suda was?
He hoped it would come to light before he was killed by either Chakrii or his next in line: a thug who always seemed to be at the warehouse when Aanwat had occasion to be there. The guy was big and looked as if he might be only half Thai. He spoke Thai with an American accent. Everyone called him Tea. He didn’t know why, and there was no way he was going to ask him about his nickname. Aanwat couldn’t bring himself to speak to the man directly, and he tried to avoid him entirely whenever possible. He had an American-born arrogance about him, and he deeply chilled Aanwat. He had caught a glimpse of a tattoo under his shirtsleeve one day and couldn’t stop wondering what it was. A list of people he’d already killed or some symbol of it? Aanwat was sure it was something menacing and, when they had occasion to be in the same room, he found it difficult to stop staring at that little hint of what he was sure was something ominous at the base of his sleeve. The man had caught him looking at it once and given him a stare that turned him into a frozen block of fear.
What Aanwat didn’t know was how much time he had left before they shot him, sent him back to Thailand, or, worse, dragged him deeper into something he wanted no part of. No matter which way it went, he understood that he was involved in an organization that was doing much more than human trafficking. He’d seen caches of packages that he believed were heroin and overheard them laughing about removing a few fingers from an “associate who was uncooperative.”
Aanwat sat down on the bed and slowly unwrapped the hamburger he had bought for his dinner. It had gotten cold, and as he swallowed, each bite sat like a lump in his esophagus, barely going down with repeated swallowing, but he couldn’t afford to waste money on uneaten food, so he kept chewing until he was finished and then sat on the bed thinking about how he was going to get his hands on Suda.
Claire
When darkness and loneliness are bedfellows in the night.
When the only arms we feel around us
are not to assuage our pain
and fear,
but are a caress purchased and required.
Unaided and abandoned,
vulnerability is our daily nourishment.
Claire tossed her pen beside her onto the bed. Writing poetry was not easy. Snippets of words—some lines coming together—were all she had. When she tried to compose full verses, the lines became fragmented and faulty. She crumpled her attempts.
Claire tucked her pen into her notebook and closed the cover. She laid on her bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of Hope House. Things were a little more quiet than usual now that it was just Claire and Suda, Grace and Simone living in Hope House. Hailey had moved to a less-restrictive placement the week before; in the end, Claire hadn’t said a word about her discovery of the secreted pills. Now she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall, the anxiety brought about by her silence weighed her down.
She opened up her notebook again and scrawled, “minimal involvement” on a line. Maybe she would try to write a poem about how to keep your sanity by not caring about other people. Claire wondered how long before some other depressed, thrashed girl showed up. It was inevitable. But for now, she kind of liked it being just the four of them. She heard the hiss of the coffee maker and the sound of Grace sliding a baking sheet into the oven and closing the door. She wondered what Grace was making for breakfast and sat up. She scrawled a few more lines of poetry before being called in to eat.
She picked up the latest novel she was reading. It was Possession by A. S. Byatt. That chick can write poetry, Claire thought. She only had thirty-eight pages to go and would soon need to check out a new stack of books from the library to quench her voracious thirst for the written word. Every other Tuesday, after her crack-of-dawn bakery shift ended, Claire gathered her stack of old reads and made the trek to the library for a new batch of novels. But for now, she was desperate to know how this one ended. The book was infused with poetry, and Claire loved the way the way the words entwined and created a miniature story within the larger story.
She realized now that the teachers she’d had who had tried to teach poetry had done a miserable job. The poems they’d used as examples had been either too obvious or too boring. Not long after she arrived at Hope House, though, she found herself doodling interesting words and phrases that came to mind on scraps of paper that she found laying around here and there, but they were hopeless and stupid. She wanted to ask Frances, her favorite librarian, to suggest a book of poetry. But Frances was off limits because Claire wasn’t allowed to go to the main branch in case Nick was lurking nearby, still looking for her.
If she could be anyone, it would be Frances. She had an old-fashioned name, but she also had purple hair and an unexpectedly edgy look. No one would ever guess she was a librarian because she was vivacious and outgoing instead of the reserved stereotype people still expected. As far as Claire could tell, Frances knew more about everything under the sun than anyone else in the world. And what she didn’t know, she could find. There was also the matter of the Samuel Beckett poem tattooed on her forearm:
Ever tried, ever failed.
No matter.
Try again. Fail again.
Fail better.
Claire sighed deeply. She missed the San Francisco main branch library desperately, but one of the rules of the safe house was that the women were to stay away from places they had been known to frequent in their past, which ruled out the regal building she so loved. She still sought out the stacks, but was forced to go out of the city, just to be extra safe. Or sometimes, in a pinch, she would furtively slip into the library at the Mechanics Institute, but that was smack dab in the middle of downtown, which always brought back bad memories.
Truth be told, she checked over her shoulder constantly whenever she was away from Hope House because the fear of running into Nick made her blood run cold. Whenever she did have occasion to leave the safe haven of the bakery, she—unbeknownst to Simone and Grace—slipped a switchblade she’d procured with some tip jar funds into her pocket. She had decided that if she ever was grabbed, she sure wasn’t going to allow herself to be taken again. She’d rather die fighting than end up under his thumb again. When it happened the first time, she didn’t have the wherewithal to fight back, but she did now.
The days after Claire learned of her mom’s death had passed in a blur of grief and disbelief. Her friends and the school had been told she was sick with a bad flu and would be out for a few days.
Nick constantly hovered: making her breakfast, assuring her that everything would be okay. She was wary and watchful. Nick didn’t go to work those first days, and she was left alone only when he went to the store to get all of her favorite food. He cooked and cleaned while she existed in an almost fugue state: her eyes turned inward to her sense of loss to a point of feeling cut off from her surroundings. It wasn’t that she was surprised that this had happened. Hadn’t she always kind of known it would? But it was the finality of it. It was the loss of hope. It was fear at a new level. Now it wasn’t just wondering whether there would be enough food, or whether her mother would be passed out on the couch, but the fear of the absolute unknown. What was going to happen now?
She wanted to go back to school. She craved normalcy. Nick agreed that it was all right for her to go, but she was forbidden from telling anyone what had happened. It wouldn’t be difficult to deceive her friends about it, even though her heart cried out to confide everything. After all, they had never met her mom because Claire always had been afraid of letting them see how they were living. To a certain extent, they had never truly known her because of it. She was embarrassed and always had been. Her life was not like life was in books. It was not like life was supposed to be. She had never been loved the way her friends had.
She put on her favorite clothes for her first day back to school. Her jeans were soft with pre-purchased holes and her designer tee-shirt had been found at a secondhand shop.
“Hey,” her friend Kate found her at her locker. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah,” she slipped into an easy lie. She tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear, feigning preoccupation so she didn’t have to meet Kate’s eyes.
“God, it’s so unfair. You’re skinnier than ever! I wish I had gotten the flu instead of you.”
“Trust me,” Claire felt her eyes threaten to well up and immediately swallowed her emotion. “You wouldn’t have wanted this. It … it sucked. Really bad.”
“Still, look at you. More beautiful than ever. Ugh!”
“Shut up, Kate,” she said more harshly than intended. “Stuff like that doesn’t matter.” Then to soften the effect of her tone, she closed her locker, linked arms with her friend, and walked with her to their algebra class. “Sorry.”
“You’re such a bitch sometimes,” Kate said.
“I know. I don’t mean to be.” She bumped her hip against Kate’s to show that she regretted her harsh tone and even pretended to be interested in the school dish that had happened while she’d been at home.
Every day it was the same: go to school and then the library for homework and escape; feign happiness; pretend to have a normal life; go home to Nick, who had taken over her mom’s room at the apartment. At home, he cooked dinner and continued to offer her wine every night, but she continued to eschew the offer with a vague and ongoing sense of heightened wariness. They would make awkward conversation until she could escape to her room. Then she would do it all again the next day.
Her teachers thought she was a superstar. She was getting straight As. The kids at school envied her because she was beautiful and had an aloofness that made them want her attention but was in fact a profound need for self-preservation. Yet, because of both her surprising beauty and her fierce intellect, there was a piqued sense of intrigue around her no matter how much she tried to imitate normalcy.
She said “Yes” to every sleepover or dinner invitati
on possible, grabbing any excuse to stay out of the apartment. Nick seemed increasingly off. Agitated. Nervous. His hair was occasionally greasy, and he was getting too thin. There was something not right, but she was too afraid to tell a soul about it. If she was sent away, she would lose even the last memories of her mom and her former life because they felt contained within the apartment, which they’d had her entire life. It was home, even though it was a messed-up version of it.
“How old are you these days, Claire?” Nick asked her one evening over dinner.
She looked up from the piece of chicken she was cutting. “Fourteen. Why?”
“When’s your birthday?”
“Not for months.” She answered, for some weird reason not wanting him to know the actual date.
“You’re really becoming the spitting image of your mother.”
“Yeah, you’ve told me that.”
“I loved her very much, you know.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she just looked at her plate.
“She helped me out sometimes.”
She looked up at him. Put a bite in her mouth so there was no need to respond.
“She was great. You could be, too.” His tone was offhand. Like it would be something nice for her.
Then her natural curiosity got the better of her. She had wondered many nights what the two of them were up to when they were out.
“How did she help you?”
“She entertained clients. Important clients. Helped me close deals with her charm,” he said, leaning back in his chair. He pointed his fork at her. “You could do the same.”