That night Pim’s second customer passes out on top of her, in the middle of saying something. She waits politely for him to finish speaking, and when she realizes he won’t, she rocks him back and forth, using her elbows against the mattress for leverage, until he rolls off, landing on his back on the edge of the bed, his knuckles brushing the carpet.
Pim shakes him twice, saying, “Hello,” because she doesn’t remember his name. He begins to snore.
She gets up and pulls on her clothes, looks around the room, and sees his trousers on the carpet in front of the bathroom door. The wallet is in the right-hand back pocket, and she eases it out, looking for her sixteen hundred baht. What she sees is a stack of American twenties as thick as a comic book. She works two out, and then the nameless man snores again, loudly enough to make her jump, and she takes five more, and then five after that. She jams the money into the back pocket of her jeans and quietly lets herself out.
Thirty minutes later she’s sitting in an alley off Sukhumvit with her back against a fence made of chain-link and big sheets of rippled green plastic, with her legs crossed and a flimsy plastic Ziploc bag in her lap. From the bag she takes an aluminum-foil pipe and a big, crumbly pinch of crushed yaa baa tablets. She pushes the speed into the bowl of the pipe, being careful not to bend the pipe so sharply it’ll crimp the air flow, and then-with the pipe dangling loosely from her mouth-she breaks a wooden match, licks it to get it wet enough that it won’t catch fire, and shoves the sharp end into the jet of a disposable butane lighter. A flick of the wheel shows her that the flame is still fat and yellow and soft, so she turns up the flow and wiggles the splinter of wet wood to close the opening some more, burning her fingertips, until the lighter produces a blue needle of flame. Then she points the needle into the pipe and hits the smoke, and her heart rises eagerly to greet its new friend. This is the first time she’s done it alone. This is the first time she hasn’t had to share.
As she exhales and hits it again, she sees Arthit’s sad, disapproving eyes. She slams her own eyes shut and fills her lungs until they feel like they’ll explode.
In less than a minute, the Earth, with Arthit and her family and everyone else pinned helplessly to its surface, is a thousand feet below her and, all alone in the sky, she can look down on the dark, folded world with cities gleaming in its seams. It’s so beautiful she thinks she might cry.
That night Vladimir uses his teeth to unscrew the cap from his second bottle of vodka. He’s in his same old room but sitting on the new Kirghiz carpet he bought with the money Rafferty paid him.
He reaches for his empty glass, but it dodges at the last moment and he knocks it over. He closes one eye and fixes the glass with a glare until he’s wrapped his fingers around it. As he pours, he asks himself for the thirtieth or fortieth time since he opened the first bottle how much he could earn by telling what he knows-from a safe distance, of course-to Murphy. He asks again the corollary question: Who is more likely to be alive in a few days, Murphy or Rafferty? When this is over, who will he have to share Bangkok with? He gets the same answer he’s been getting all night long. It’s not the answer he wants, but if there’s one thing Vladimir has learned in a lifetime of betraying and being betrayed, it’s that winning is all that matters.
The rain hits the window, hard as a handful of nails.
But there remains the problem, he thinks as he raises the glass. There remains the problem of Baby Spy. He could not do this to Baby Spy. So much youth, so much promise, such a beautifully devious nature. He could do nothing to harm her. His soul, his magnificent Russian soul, would not permit it.
His eyes fill up in admiration of the oceanic vastness of his soul, even as the dry clockwork of his mind says, There must be a way to get her off the stage, just for the amount of time it would take.
That night Anna awakes with a start, breathing fast, feeling as though she’s been in free fall. It’s the second time in a few days this has happened. She finds herself wrapped in Arthit’s arms again; he’s been hugging her in his sleep as though he’s afraid she’ll dissolve before he can wake up.
She eases herself loose, hearing him murmur a protest, but he’s still asleep. His breathing is deep and regular, his face-when she turns to look at it-is soft, relieved of the tension it harbors all day, tension that really abandons it only when he sleeps.
And, she thinks, with a tiny pinch in her heart, when he looks at her.
His hair always gets flattened by the pillow. The second morning she woke up with him, she went to the kitchen and got him some coffee and then steered him to a mirror and wrote a note saying it looked as if someone had ironed him. He had laughed a mouthful of coffee onto the mirror, and that sad little maid, whatever her name was, had come running at the sound
A thousand things had gone through the girl’s face. She’d been happy and amazed to hear him laugh, but she hadn’t known Anna was there, and the girl’s head was made of glass. Anna could see everything.
The poor kid.
Anna has one of what she’s come to think of as her moments, when she feels as though all the strings that run through her life, the ones that attach her to her work, to her son, to her future and his, to the promises and commitments she’s made, the bad decisions and the good, have tangled inside her into a giant, misshapen knot she’ll never be able to untie and isn’t allowed to cut. She knows that whatever she does next will be wrong.
In a whisper even she can barely hear, she says to Arthit, “I had no idea this would happen. Please,” she says, “you have to believe me. I never thought it would turn out like this.”
That night at 4:20 A.M., Murphy’s headlights illuminate the opening gate, and he stops the car with a jerk. Unsure of what he’s seeing, he hits the remote again to reverse the gate’s course. Then he turns on the high beams and gets out of the car, leaving the engine idling and the door open. Ignoring the rain, he moves quickly to the gate, keeping to one side so his shadow in the headlights doesn’t obscure what’s stuck there.
It’s not until he’s practically on top of it that the object resolves itself into what he actually knew it was at first sight: a human ear. The hairs that rise on the back of his neck don’t go down again until he touches it and realizes it’s plastic.
He rips it from the gate and finds himself automatically beginning to slip it into his shirt pocket. Time folds around him, and he’s back there, with the old blood on his pocket and the weight of the reeking necklace bumping against his chest. His heart galloping, he pulls the folded, sodden piece of paper off the thumbtack that secures it. Tilting it toward the headlights and opening it up, he sees, in thick black lines, two words in Vietnamese that he automatically translates: Four survivors. He backs away until his shoulder blades touch the gate, folding the paper as though to hide the words from prying eyes, and slowly turns in a half circle, looking for the enemy.
Back in the car, he watches in the rearview mirror as the gates close safely behind him. When he’s pulled in to his usual parking space in front of the house, he shuts off the engine and sits there, his hands still on the wheel, feeling the muscles in his shoulders and back bunch and jump like those of someone who’s been wired to a field generator. He waits until it’s stopped and his breathing has smoothed out, and then he gets out of the car, leaving the note and the plastic ear on the passenger seat.
He’s just keyed in the front-door combination and pushed the door open when something cold touches the back of his neck, and for a second his heart slams itself shut so hard he thinks he’s dying. But then he smells her.
As he turns slowly to face her, Treasure backs away, out of arm’s length, holding his automatic in both hands, in the approved shooter’s position. It’s pointed directly at his heart. Her face is blackened except for the narrow, skin-colored strip that contains the bridge of her nose and her wide, wide eyes. When she smiles and takes another step back, he sees that she’s also somehow blackened her teeth.
“If this was a real war,” Treasur
e says, shivering with some unreadable emotion, “you’d be dead now.”
In the house the alarm begins to shrill.
That night, A little before five in the morning, Rafferty snaps awake to a high, repetitive bleat, coming from the clutter of cell phones on the bedside table. He rolls over, spots the one that’s blinking, and picks it up. Presses the button to answer but says nothing.
“Hello?” a woman says. She’s American. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
He says nothing. He doesn’t know the voice.
“Are you there? Is this voice mail, is that it?” She waits as Rafferty silently counts to three. “Well, if it is, I’m calling Mr. Rafferty? You’ve phoned me several times, but I wasn’t able to return the call, and I’m sorry about that, but here I am at last. Sorry about the time, too, but I just landed. You’ve got my hotel number in your phone now, and I’m in Bangkok. Oh,” she says, “silly me. This is Helen Eckersley.”
Rafferty waits until she’s hung up. He powers the phone off and pops out the SIM card. Then he pulls the battery from the back, just to be sure. With a loud sigh, he gets up and crosses the room, slides the water glass out of its clear plastic sleeve, and drops the card and the battery into the sleeve, knotting it so they can’t slip out. He goes into the bathroom and turns on the hot water, letting it run to get it as hot as possible as he flips on lights in the bedroom and opens his deteriorating shoulder bag. Throws in the plastic sleeve and then wads up the day’s T-shirt and stuffs it in, too.
When he’s finished with the bag, he pours both the room’s packets of instant coffee into the glass and totes the glass into the bathroom, where he runs the hot water into it, stirring with his finger. Two minutes later, wearing a mustache of powdered coffee, he calls Ming Li’s room and gives her five minutes to pack and meet him in the hall.
At 5:28 A.M., they check into a third-class hotel several kilometers away. Rafferty slides the Delacroix passport across the desk, expecting the clerk to reject it, but all he does is look quizzically at Ming Li, photocopy the page with Rafferty’s photo on it, and hand it back, along with a room key. Aside from the two of them and the clerk, the huge lobby is empty, and Rafferty feels the man’s eyes on them all the way to the elevator.
Up in the room, Ming Li offers to take the couch, since she’s the shorter of the two, but Rafferty claims it, and as she snores daintily on top of the still-made bed, he gazes down at the predawn lights of Bangkok and realizes-for the first time-that when someone thinks he’s looking at city lights, 90 percent of what he sees is darkness.
Part Four
SHAKING THE PAPER
25
The Murder of Children Does Affect Me
Around six that morning, the rain breaks, and small, ragged patches of blue open up and glide slowly from south to north as though they’re the clouds and the gray is the sky. Low in the west, the horizon has the dull metallic shine of pewter. To the east Rafferty can see a dark, vertical curtain of rain.
He’s spent an anxious and mostly sleepless night. He seems to have sand beneath his eyelids and cotton wrapped around his brain; thoughts come slowly and shapelessly, and he has to force them to hold still while he examines them for usefulness. His center of gravity has risen uneasily to the region of his lungs and his heart, forcing him to sit low in the backseat of the cab with his knees jammed against the back of the driver’s seat.
“We’re doing this in order of availability, not importance,” he says to Ming Li, mostly to see whether he can compose the sentence out loud. He looks at the list in his hand and then at his watch-7:10. He sighs yet again and dials Arthit.
“There you are,” Arthit says. He sounds relieved.
“Here I am,” Rafferty says.
“To cut to the chase, the drug people have a line into the airlines that fly here from Kuala Lumpur,” Arthit says. “Your Mr. Bland, Edward Bland-”
“Eddie,” Rafferty says.
“Ah. Well, the ticket says Edward.”
“What ticket?”
“The one he bought last night. To Bangkok. This afternoon.”
Rafferty makes a writing pantomime in Ming Li’s direction, and she ransacks her bag.
“What time? What flight number? Which airport?”
“Wait. Okay, here we are. Flight 21, arriving at three-twenty P.M. at Suvarnabhumi, which is a good thing since the airport at Don Mueang is flooded out.”
Rafferty repeats the flight information as Ming Li jots it down. Into the phone he says, “Can you have someone there?”
“I could have Kosit call in sick.”
“I think it would be worth it. Bland’s coming either to blow something up or to finalize the plan to blow something up.”
“I’ll get him on it. Anything else?”
“Yes. Do you remember what channel shot the tape when the guy was killed? By the way, his name was Billie Joe Sellers.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was right when I said all this has to do with Vietnam. I found someone who knew him.”
Arthit says, “He was USA, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. It was Channel Seven.”
“Could you call the news department and go all official and find out who tipped them to send the crew?”
Arthit says, “I’ve been wondering about that myself.”
Poke says good-bye and dials another number. “Vladimir. Get up now. Get Janos up, too.”
“MR.… MR. Rafferty?” Andrew’s hair is wet and slicked back, and his face is shining with soap and water. His school clothes are honor-student immaculate, and when he opened the door, he’d had the penny-bright Oh, boy, it’s morning! look that only children can manage, but it changes to dread the instant he sees Rafferty’s face. He glances at Ming Li, but then his eyes jerk back to Rafferty’s. “Has anything happened-” His voice breaks, and he licks his lips. “Is … is Miaow okay?”
“Anh Duong,” a male voice says, a no-nonsense voice with extra starch. Its owner asks a question in Vietnamese.
“It’s … ummm,” Andrew calls in English, and immediately lowers his voice and says, through his teeth, “Miaow?”
“She’s fine,” Rafferty says, and the man snaps his question again, in a tone that suggests long familiarity with command.
“It’s Mr. Rafferty,” Andrew says, a bit wildly. “Miaow’s … you know. And … and a lady.”
Ming Li says, “A lady?” and the door is pulled the rest of the way open.
The man who stands there isn’t much taller than Ming Li, but he seems to have a very high density. His face is almost square, wide-cheekboned and sharp-jawed, with small, hard black eyes and a mouth that pulls down, drum-tight, at the corners. He wears a white shirt and a dark, small-patterned tie, tightly knotted, over very fine navy blue slacks. His feet are in black socks. “Andrew,” he says in English. “Finish your breakfast.”
Andrew is gone so fast that Rafferty can barely see him move.
“And you are?” Andrew’s father is looking at Ming Li.
“I’m Miaow’s aunt,” Ming Li says. “Kind of.”
“I am Nguyen.” No name, no title. He steps back to allow them in, glancing down at a glittering steel watch as they pass. “I have coffee if you want some.”
Poke says, “Thank you. Have you got fifteen minutes?”
Nguyen says, “Does this concern my son and your daughter?”
“I wish it did.”
“Really,” Nguyen says. “Please go left, into the living room.”
“Can I help with the coffee?” Ming Li asks.
“No, Auntie, you cannot. Just go sit with your … whatever Mr. Rafferty is to you.”
“My half brother.”
“Yes, of course.” He shakes his head. “I’ll be back in a moment. And please. Speak softly. My wife is in bed with a migraine.”
Ming Li looks over at Poke as Nguyen turns abruptly. She fills her cheeks with air and lets it escape slowly between her lips. “Poor kid,” s
he whispers.
As she and Poke turn the corner from the hallway into the living room, she says, “Sheesh.” The room is larger than Rafferty’s entire apartment. But despite the sweep of space and the floor-to-ceiling windows, opening onto an expanse of gray sky and glinting buildings, the room feels rigid and cold. Rafferty has a sense that things he can’t see are whispering in corners. He instinctively dislikes the pale blue upholstery and the spotless white carpet, the permanent bouquets of silk flowers dead center on the dark, heavy tables. The whole place cries out for someone to come in and mess it up, and the reason for Miaow’s lie about Rose’s parents becomes even clearer.
“I’m not clean enough to sit down,” Ming Li whispers, her eyes on a sky-blue sofa. Along the longest wall, just a few feet from the windows, is a round table with three blue-silk-covered chairs pulled up to it and a fourth at a precise forty-five-degree angle. On the table in front of the angled chair are several newspapers, folded and stacked military straight. Rafferty lifts his eyebrows at the table, and Ming Li tracks him across the soft carpets to it. They sit, just as Andrew takes a speedy diagonal from what Rafferty supposes is the kitchen, heading for the entrance hall. His head is down, and he doesn’t look at them. They hear the outside door close, presumably behind him.
Five or six minutes drag past. Rafferty is tapping his foot and looking at his watch when Nguyen comes in with a teak tray in his hands. He’s put on his suit coat and buttoned it, a gesture that increases the distance between them. Ming Li scoots back in her chair to give him access to the table, and he puts the tray in its center. It contains a carafe, two cup-and-saucer sets in a thin, filigreed china with tiny blue flowers on it, and cream and sugar in matching containers. Nguyen pours for each of them, indicates the cream and sugar with his left hand, and sits, undoing the lower button on his suit coat as he does so.
The three of them face one another for a moment, and then Nguyen inclines his head and lifts his eyebrows. Ming Li spoons sugar into her coffee as Rafferty jumps in.
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