For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  Rafferty’s throat feels like there’s an iron band being tightened around it. He says, “What a guy.”

  “So if you’re thinking of doing new deals with him,” Kalmenson says to Nguyen, “jump at it. Just keep your hand on your wallet.”

  “All this sounds very rosy,” Nguyen says. “But tell me. Is there any reason he might be feeling some pressure?”

  Kalmenson’s expression, as he regards Nguyen, goes remote. “Why do you ask?”

  Nguyen pours wine into Kalmenson’s glass and offers some to Poke, who shakes his head. He pours a bit into his own glass. “I have a preference for choosing successful people as my—I mean, my country’s—partners. But I also want to know that my partner has some real skin in the game. I want to know that the business will matter to him in the long run, because that’s how I think, long run. He’s the youngest son, and he’s obviously doing well. But he’s got older brothers who can probably overrule him. How do I know he’ll still have his shoulder to the wheel in, say, five years?”

  Kalmenson eyes him blankly for a moment and says, “Where’s the food?’

  Nguyen says, “Coming,” and settles comfortably in his chair.

  “What you want,” Kalmenson says, rubbing his hands together, “this new topic, that’s a little beyond just information. It’s judgment. That makes it more in the nature of a personal consultation.”

  “How much?”

  Kalmenson purses the little mouth in thought. “A thousand, American.”

  “Do you have that much on you, Poke?”

  Poke says, “Sure,” and reaches into his pocket. “Hundreds okay?”

  “I’m sorry?” Kalmenson says. He pushes out a smile and then turns it off. “I’ve missed something. What’s your role in all this?”

  “Mr. Rafferty represents some special interests,” Nguyen says. “I can’t tell you more without compromising the nature of my business with Ton.”

  Kalmenson says, “American interests?”

  “And Thai,” Poke says. He holds the money out. “Sorry to be so gauche, paying in the open like this. I know you’d be more comfortable getting it under the table, where the whole world can’t see it, but I can’t reach you under the table.”

  Kalmenson stretches out a hand and palms the money. “Rafferty, right?”

  Nguyen says, “Of the Philadelphia Raffertys.”

  “Fine.” The money disappears into a shirt pocket, and the man in the baseball cap who’s been looking in through the window decides it’s time to go elsewhere. “Funny we haven’t bumped into each other.”

  “Mr. Rafferty operates very privately,” Nguyen says. “But I’m interrupting. You were about to tell me why Ton has so much skin in the game.”

  “The long run, you said.” Kalmenson brings the tips of his fingers together into a tent and regards them with satisfaction. “A business is like a building,” he says. He raises his hands several inches above the table, fingertips still touching. “Roof beams,” he says. “A company needs a good foundation, which Ton’s family’s company has: several generations of experience, lots of working capital. But it also needs roof beams. And in an Asian family business, roof beams are sons.”

  Nguyen blows out a little air, and Rafferty is sure he doesn’t know that he did it.

  “The family is short on sons,” Kalmenson says. “His older brothers, between them, produced four daughters and one son, but the son races motor cars, uses drugs. Useless, in and out of trouble.”

  “And Ton?” Nguyen asks.

  “Two daughters, one son, who got himself killed climbing some damnfool mountain, about fourteen years ago. But before he died, he and his wife had two sons. Ton’s grandsons.”

  Nguyen says, “Ahhhh.”

  “Yes,” Kalmenson says. “They bear the name. They’re eleven and twelve, I think, but they’re the only ones with the family name who will be in line to inherit. It’s a wonderful irony, don’t you think? Being the runt all these years, the one wearing hand-me-downs, and all of a sudden you see the future, and it’s all yours. Or, at least, your grandsons’. Since the first one was born, Ton has been making deals left and right. Almost got a personal candidate into the running for Prime Minister.”

  “Pan,” Rafferty says.

  Kalmenson blots his lips with his napkin, as though he’s tasted something unexpectedly greasy. “You’re well informed. But Pan was a peasant whose head got too big, and he got himself shot. Ton will try again, though. So that’s your skin in the game, Captain Nguyen. He’s going to do anything and everything to make sure that company goes to his sons—sorry, grandsons—and that it’s thriving when it does. The long run that you mentioned. He’s in it.”

  Nguyen says, “Sons.”

  Rafferty says, “Grandsons,” but he’s certain Nguyen doesn’t hear him.

  40

  Overcoat of Rage

  RAFFERTY FEELS AS though he’s wrapped in a thick overcoat of rage as they push down the crowded sidewalk. All he can think about are Rose and Miaow—and Chalee, her sister hanging in that empty house. Thousands of children, thrown onto the streets of Bangkok to live any way they can, footnotes to some spreadsheet of gain and loss in the rice trade.

  Kalmenson is nattering on to Nguyen in the over-emphatic, contentious manner of a bad drunk, as Nguyen nods and interjects the occasional sentence fragment. To Nguyen’s left, between him and the traffic, is Tuan, his bodyguard, whose military experience advertises itself in his walk. Since there are too many of them to walk abreast, Rafferty is a couple of steps behind, with Chinh to his right, his sport coat—conspicuous in this heat—suggesting he might be packing.

  From behind, Kalmenson carries his head in a way that seems to announce, here’s a guy you might want to punch. He walks with a penguin’s waddle, his toes turned out and his upper body tick-tocking slightly from side to side, like a metronome. Rafferty is pleasurably lost in loathing when Chinh touches his arm, and Kalmenson, at virtually the same moment, says, “One of yours?”

  Ahead of Rafferty, Tuan turns to his left, his spine straight as a ruler, one hand going to the small of his back, beneath his loose-fitting shirt. At the curb, moving slowly to keep pace with them, is a black town car. Its dark windows are all the way up.

  Rafferty hears a scuff on the pavement and turns back to see Chinh, his right hand creating some misery at the pressure points on either side of a neck. The neck belongs to the man with the baseball cap who’d passed their window so frequently while they were eating, and now he’s almost hanging from Chinh’s hand, his shoulders all the way to his ears, his face the mask of tragedy, mouth wide, eyes shut.

  Approaching them purposefully from the other direction are two uniformed policemen.

  “Let him go, Chinh,” Nguyen says. He gives the town car a small wave. “One of theirs,” he says to Kalmenson. Then, to all of them, “Come on, the office is just up here.”

  Seeing Mr. Baseball fade back into the crowd, turning his head left and right with some difficulty, the cops slow, looking a bit directionless. Nguyen leads the group briskly toward the policemen, chattering to Kalmenson about the Thai government’s rice stockpiling program, and when one of the cops takes a sidestep to plant himself in Nguyen’s path, two taps from the town car’s horn back him up again.

  Rafferty follows obediently behind, feeling useless and outclassed.

  RAFFERTY’S ACQUAINTANCE, A reporter named Floyd Preece, is mercifully out, although the reek of old cigars marks the cubicle as his. A note on the computer screen announces that all Rafferty will have to do is swipe the touchpad, and he’ll find himself in the database. Then he can just tab from item to item.

  You said your guy was in his mid-thirties, the note reads, so I set you up to start about 15 years back. Too bad you don’t have a name, but you got one break. A society reporter here is doing a big picture book about the clothes of Bangkok society and she’s been working for years on pulling out the pieces that have pictures with them. I’ll be back about four,
and you can tell me how this story is going to win me the Pulitzer.

  “Wasn’t that pleasant,” Nguyen says, pulling a chair from the adjoining cubicle, one of many that seems to be empty.

  “The lunch or the little dance on the sidewalk?” Rafferty removes from his hip pocket a printout of Andrew’s enhanced photo of the reflected man and smoothes it out on the desk, studying it. Then he taps the computer’s touchpad, and up come three ladies with Imelda Marcos hairstyles, frozen hovering over their dinners by a flashbulb. He sees no one he recognizes, hits the tab key, and is presented with a line-up of eight or twelve people, dressed in the kind of clothes he’s never seen in person, the men looking like Daddy Warbucks and the women holding bouquets.

  “Both,” Nguyen says. “By now, there are probably fifteen people on the phone lines in and out of Ton’s office. Which reminds me, I think we need reinforcements.” He pulls out his phone and switches to Vietnamese and a more peremptory tone, and Rafferty recognizes the name “Homer” and what sound like several other names.

  More matrons, more shiny material that seems to be satin. The photos are dreadful, just flat flash on heavily made-up skin and lacquered hair. Many of the eyes above the smiles look tired or jaded or both; being a rich Thai man’s wife is not an unmixed blessing. Every now and then a much younger second wife, her hair still allowed to obey gravity, looks at the camera in pleased surprise, glad to be there. About two hundred pictures in, Rafferty says, “This may not take a long time, but it’s going to feel like a long time.”

  Nguyen says, “If he’s even in there.”

  “If he’s not,” Rafferty says, paging through, “all we’ll have done is waste a big chunk of the twenty-four hours Tran gave us.”

  “Nineteen hours now.” Nguyen sits back in his chair and closes his eyes. “If you see something, say my name. I wake up easily.”

  Rafferty says, “You’re kidding,” but gets no answer. Ten or eleven clusters of women, thirty-five or forty tuxedos, and twelve hundred dead flowers later, Nguyen’s breathing deepens and evens out.

  He glances at his watch: 1:44. Up pops a wedding, which gives way to a charity ball, which gives way to some debutantes, which gives way to a long line of rigid-looking women lined up for an audience with Princess Sirindhorn, which gives way to another wedding, then an event in a museum, then wedding announcements with photos, then …

  Then he’s falling off a cliff. He sits bolt upright, blinking at the screen, which is now in color, apparently a Sunday edition, and he has no idea how many days he snoozed through, just reflexively hitting the tab key. Checks the date: he’s covered five months so far. Okay, change rhythm. He gets up, edges past Nguyen, and goes to a vacant cubicle, where he phones Arthit.

  “How’s your pet cop doing?” he says. “She at work yet?”

  “It’s … slow,” Arthit says. He sounds tense and stopped-up, as though he’d prefer to be shouting.

  “Not compared to what I’m doing, it’s not.”

  “She has to pull up each case, get the victim’s name, and then search five or six indexes to build a picture of their business interests. What they did, names of their corporations, all that. Then she takes all those corporate and personal names and searches the business sections of three newspapers in the eight to ten weeks preceding their death.”

  “At least she’s got names. I’ve got ten thousand women in satin, a lot of people with the same names as minor cities, and a photographer whose flash should be taken away forever.”

  “She hit one interesting bit so far. The second victim we know of was in a bidding war for a big fat slice of cellular geography. The only company against him belongs to Ton’s family, which already controlled some surrounding territory. Ton was arguing economies of scale—doubling up on existing cell towers and so forth—and the other side was arguing that they’d provide better service because they wouldn’t be doubling up on cell towers.”

  “Maybe my job isn’t so boring after all,” Rafferty says.

  “More than a hundred million US a year at stake,” Arthit says. “When the victim was killed, in what was supposed to be an attempted robbery, Ton’s guys argued that the other side no longer had experienced leadership. They won the contract.”

  “That’s our boy. Wait’ll I tell you some of the other stuff he’s up to.”

  “Lieutenant Clemente is waving at me,” Arthit says. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Don’t forget my chart,” Rafferty says. “The wheel with Ton in the middle.”

  “You’ll get it.”

  “How’s Thanom?”

  “Falling apart. Got to go.”

  Rafferty wanders for a couple of minutes, girding his loins before re-entering high society. Then he edges past Nguyen again, careful not to touch him or wake him.

  Without opening his eyes, Nguyen says, “Everything okay back home?”

  “Got one possible murder with motive, if a hundred million US sounds like a motive.”

  “Get back to it. What year are you in?”

  “1993.”

  “Skip to 1995.”

  “Why?”

  “The man in the reflection isn’t very old. Unless his family is more prominent than Ton’s, he’s not going to be on those pages until he’s more than just a promising college graduate.”

  Rafferty takes another look at the printout photo and bangs his way through the database until he hits January of 1995. Instantly, he notes positive fashion trends: better hair on the women, more business suits and fewer tuxes on the men, a general sense that people have stopped getting embalmed as preparation for an evening out. The events are the same, though: more charity balls, some product launches—businesses of the rich and famous—and these draw a lot of people, so they slow him down a little, more people awaiting royal audiences, more weddings, more weddings, more—

  —and there he is. The proud groom beside his beaming bride. Rafferty’s eyes go back and forth between Andrew’s blow-up and the newspaper shot; the man on the computer screen is younger than the one reflected in the window. The newspaper photographer’s flash swallows up some detail, so he can’t be entirely certain, and it’s not until the fourth or fifth time he looks at the wedding photo that he even registers the bride’s father.

  He says, “Captain Nguyen.”

  “Right here,” Nguyen says, and he is. He leans past Rafferty to look at the screen. Then he starts to laugh, very softly. “The son-in-law,” he says.

  Rafferty says to the picture of Ton, smiling happily on the screen beside his daughter and her new husband, “Gotcha.”

  BEFORE HE’LL STEP into the street, Nguyen makes a short call and speaks very brisk Vietnamese. Then he slips the phone into his pocket and says, “Thirty seconds.”

  A few seconds early, Homer pushes the door open and says, “The other side is at the curb. Black car.”

  “How many do we have?” Nguyen asks.

  “Counting the two of you, seven.”

  “Fine.” To Rafferty, he says, “Stay close to me, and I mean that.”

  Homer backs out, Nguyen and Rafferty following, into the late-afternoon heat, their shoulders almost touching. Waiting for them are Chinh, Tuan, and two other Vietnamese men, blunt-faced, with the seen-everything eyes of cops. In the time it takes Rafferty to pull the door closed behind him, they’ve formed a phalanx with Nguyen and Rafferty at the center and are moving up the street, against the flow of the crowd.

  To Rafferty’s right, a horn sounds, and someone shouts something. He turns to sight past Chinh and another man, and sees the black town car again. As Nguyen murmurs, “Don’t even look,” the window goes down, and the man in the passenger seat puts his head out and smiles at him.

  It’s the man Miaow spotted the previous evening, the thuggish-faced man, the man who’d gone after her with a knife. Rafferty stops cold, and the Vietnamese man behind him bumps into him, and the man in the car grins more broadly and slowly raises his middle finger.

  And then Rafferty t
akes off, but he hasn’t gone two feet before he’s yanked back by a hand inside his collar, and the next thing he knows, Homer is marching him down the street like a marionette, and Nguyen is laughing and talking to him as though nothing in the world is wrong, and Rafferty registers the men in police uniforms scattered here and there among the pedestrians.

  He gets control of his feet and tries to walk normally, his heart pounding so hard he’s certain it must be visible. He forces a smile at Nguyen. “That was the man who tried to kill Miaow.”

  “Really,” Nguyen laughs as though Rafferty has made a joke, but he takes a quick look back and then he says, “Keep walking. Don’t even spit on the sidewalk. You’re okay unless you give them a reason. They know we won’t let go of you unless you give them legal cause to take you, and even if they do have cause, they know we’ll follow you to the station, calling lawyers as we go. But it would cost us hours, so do not give them a reason. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “That man will be part of our bargain.”

  “What bargain?”

  “The bargain we make to end this thing. And don’t look at me like that. Smile.”

  “Bargain is kind of a soft word,” Rafferty says through his smile.

  Nguyen says, “You and I together, Mr. Rafferty, we’re going to make the bargain a genuine, unadulterated, unimprovable motherfucker.”

  “WE’VE HAD A call,” Arthit says, “from the embassy guy who takes our original phones out for a walk every few hours.”

  “Hold on,” Rafferty says. “I want to put this on speaker for Captain Nguyen.”

  “Where are you?” Arthit asks, and the last word emerges tinnily from the phone’s speaker.

  “A couple of kilometers from the embassy, moving very slowly.”

  “Well, turn around. Thanom got a message from a Mr. Arundee at First Siam Bank, saying he’s located the snapshot, whatever that is, of the last withdrawal from Thanom’s mystery account. They only keep them for a year, so a few months from now, it would have been untraceable.”