The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

  For some reason the foliage never grew back. On hot, still days when the air was thick with sun and the electric buzz of cicadas, Kwan sat and probed the soil with a stick. She unearthed broken pieces of dishes, sharp corners of old pottery, on one memorable day a tarnished spoon, and this miscellany of litter became her treasure. After days of reburying it every time she went home, she thought, Nobody ever looks up. And so, high in a tree behind the clearing, knotted around a branch, she hung a tattered head scarf that she’d wrapped her treasure in. Feeling Nana waiting for a response, she finds herself wondering whether the treasure still hangs there.

  “He wanted me,” Nana says. “What about you?” She tosses her head in the direction of Kwan’s house. “Has he—”

  “No,” Kwan says flatly. “He wants to. When he’s drunk, he wants to. He fumbles at me sometimes. But I’ve never even let him put his hand under my clothes.” She feels the shame rise in her. “He looks at Mai sometimes, too.”

  “Mmmmm.” Nana glances around the clearing. “I remember this place. Sort of.”

  “I hid treasure here once.” Kwan knows it sounds silly, but anything seems safer than talking about what’s happened this night, what she just saw her father do, the things Nana has been saying.

  “Treasure?”

  “Stuff. Broken stuff. I dug it up from where the house used to be.”

  Nana turns to her. “You hid it. Did you bury it?”

  “No. It’s back there, in a tree.” She thumbs over her shoulder toward the trees behind her. “It was back there anyway.”

  Nana swallows, loudly enough for Kwan to hear it. “I want to see it.”

  “Nana, it’s junk.”

  “I want to see if it’s still there.”

  Kwan regards her. Nana’s mouth is set in a line of determination. The moon plants tiny points of light in her eyes. “Why?”

  “If it’s still there,” Nana says, and then she closes her eyes tightly, “if it’s still there, maybe everything will be all right for you.”

  Kwan is inhaling, but her throat suddenly slams shut. She looks at Nana, her eyes still closed, and an enormous sob swells into existence inside her and pushes its way out. A moment later she is sitting on the ground with no memory of how she got there, weeping loudly, and Nana is beside her with both arms wrapped around her, saying, “Hush, hush, hush. They can hear you. Go ahead and cry, but here, here. . . .” She puts a soft hand on Kwan’s wet cheek and presses Kwan’s face against the lightly fragrant silk of her blouse. “Here, baby, cry here. But quietly, quietly.”

  Kwan laces her fingers behind Nana’s neck, pressing her forehead against this girl she has never liked, and releases sob after sob into the darkness like black birds. She can almost feel them circling Nana and her, spiraling higher until they point themselves toward the moon and disappear.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Nana whispers. “It’s just time to grow up. It’s just growing up, that’s all. You’re not going to die.” She smooths Kwan’s hair with one hand, and then she says, “Oh, this hair. How I’d love hair like this.”

  Kwan says, “You can have it,” and a single laugh bubbles up. She sits back and passes her forearm over her face, blinking her eyes rapidly to force out any late-arriving tears. She’s not through crying, but she’ll wait until she’s alone. She sniffles, loudly enough to startle herself.

  Nana reaches out and wipes the side of Kwan’s neck, then dries her hand on her black silk blouse. The blouse is smeared with streaks of dirt, the dirt Kwan rubbed on her face so her father wouldn’t see her. “Let’s look,” Nana says.

  Kwan sniffles again and says, “This is silly,” but she’s getting up as she speaks the words.

  “I’ll bet you don’t remember where you—”

  “Of course I do.” She’s standing, still feeling the cool dampness on her cheeks, and blots them with the backs of her hands, and then she extends a hand to Nana, who grabs hold and hauls herself upright with a little grunt, and for a moment they’re both children again. Nana dusts her rear and scans the perimeter of the clearing. “Five hundred baht,” she says. “Five hundred baht says you can’t find it.”

  “Where would I get five hundred baht?”

  “Then you’d better find it, or you’ll owe me. And believe me, you don’t want to owe me money.”

  Kwan takes a couple of steps and stops. The edge of the clearing is black and unfamiliar. She says, “I hid it during the daytime.”

  “Do I hear an excuse?”

  “Quiet. I am going to find it.” She turns toward the road and reorients herself, then stretches an arm in front of her, her index finger pointing straight ahead, grabs a breath that seems to go all the way to her knees, and slowly rotates to the left. About three-quarters of the way around, she says, “There.” Then she follows her finger, edging between a couple of low bushes and past a waist-high tree stump, Nana trailing behind, until she comes to a tree with a broad branch angling up to the right.

  The flare of recognition gives way to surprise. “That limb was lower when I did this.”

  “So were you,” Nana says.

  “I can get up there.” On tiptoe, Kwan gets the palms of her hands on the top of the branch, judging its height, then bends her knees and jumps. She throws both arms over the branch, anchors herself, and then starts to swing her legs side to side until she can throw one foot over the limb. Once that’s done, she gets her other foot up and locks her ankles on top of the branch so she’s hanging upside down like a sloth. “I feel ten years old,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” Nana says. “Come down before you break your neck. I believe you.”

  “I want my treasure.” Kwan gets one thigh on top of the branch and hauls herself up so she’s flat on her stomach. The ground looks a long way off. She balances herself and peers into the darkness of the foliage. “Oh,” she says, surprised in spite of herself. “Oh, I can see it.” She inches forward, pulling herself along, feeling the bark scratching the tender skin on the insides of her arms. Nana is saying something beneath her, but Kwan disregards it and inches farther up, at about a twenty-degree angle, the dark, dangling shape now less than a meter away. “I don’t believe it. It’s still here.”

  Gripping the limb tightly between her thighs, she sits up and extends both hands until they touch the rough cloth of the scarf, which feels dirty and slightly sticky. There are pointed objects inside it. Suddenly she remembers the exact knot she tied in the sunlight as the cicadas whirred, and she reaches up to undo the work of nine years ago. Her fingers find the knot and trace its shape. All she has to do is ease the scarf off the twig it hangs from and then untie the knot, but she stops, feeling her hand shake. She sits there long enough for Nana to ask a question.

  “Wait,” Kwan says, not even trying to reassemble Nana’s words into something she understands. The moon throws patterns of light around her, dappling her bare arms and the front of her shirt, and the leaves of the tree shiver in a breeze so slight it might be the weight of the moonlight. The forest stretches off in all directions, a village here and a village there, linked by paths she can walk blindfolded, paths she explored alone, at a time when she imagined a monster waiting at every turn. A time when monsters were imaginary. She smells the sharp tang of the fire she noticed earlier, and she knows that if she were on the other side of her village, she would see the moon below her, shining up from the water in the paddies.

  To Nana she says, “Can you hear this?” She strikes the hanging bundle with her open palm, and it makes a clattering sound, like someone shaking rocks in cupped hands.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s it. Can you think of any other way I could have made that noise up here?”

  “No.”

  Kwan hits the bundle twice more. It rattles and clatters. Dirt sifts down through the coarse weave of the cloth onto her other hand. She hits it harder, slapping at it now, feeling the muscles in her back tighten, feeling her jaw clench, and then tears are standing in her eyes.
It’s junk, just like she said. Her treasure is junk, crusted with dirt, trash that even the poorest, hungriest child wouldn’t bend down to pick up. She sees the precision of the knot. Her eight-year-old fingers making sure her treasure wouldn’t fall. Broken things. Useless things. Worthless, but hidden.

  Like her. She reaches for the bundle again, meaning to rip it loose and throw it down, but instead, holding her breath without knowing it, she passes her hands lightly over its shape. Finding an area where the pieces bulge out beneath the cloth, she pushes them back in, tracing the teardrop form of the bag beneath her palms, patting it here and there to make it symmetrical. When she takes her hands away, it’s swinging back and forth slightly, and she puts one hand up, wide open, to still its movement. She lets her fingers rest against an eight-year-old’s treasure, closes her eyes, and tries to feel the magic it had all those years ago. She sits there like that until her arm feels heavy and the bag is warm to the touch.

  She slips sideways off the limb and lets herself drop, feetfirst, to the ground.

  Nana says, “Where is it?”

  Kwan has to clear her throat before her voice will come. “Up there.”

  Nana’s eyebrows contract and then smooth again. “And you’re going to leave it up there?”

  Kwan says, “Until I come back for it.”

  Chapter 11

  Nowhere in Particular

  In the end it was simple. Mr. Pattison came at exactly four o’clock the next afternoon and handed Kwan’s father eight one-thousand-baht bills and four five-hundreds: ten thousand baht precisely. Her father crumpled them like scrap and shoved them into his back pocket. Kwan read out loud to her mother and father the piece of paper that was meant to lock the door of the schoolhouse behind her, as though the document contained the words of the king, unquestionable and unbreakable. Her father nodded solemnly, but Kwan’s mother stayed across the room, as far from the transaction as possible. She seemed as insubstantial as smoke.

  Kwan’s father signed the paper, some kind of mark that he thought looked like writing. Mr. Pattison folded and pocketed the document, made a wai to Kwan’s father, and got one, more or less, in return. He patted Kwan on the shoulder and said, in English, “Glad you’re going to stay with us.”

  Kwan said, “Me, too. I thank you and Teacher Suttikul.”

  “No problem,” Mr. Pattison said, and then added, in his awful Thai, “We’ll look forward to seeing Kwan at school tomorrow.” He left, and the silence in the house was loud enough to drive Kwan outside.

  Her mother never met her eyes.

  The next morning Kwan left for school at the usual time, wearing her frayed uniform, the white blouse above the blue skirt with the hem her mother had let down as far as it could go to cover her daughter’s endless legs, so far that there was no fold left. Stuffed beneath the papers in Kwan’s book bag were two clean T-shirts and her only pair of jeans. She counted the steps down to the street while, behind her, sounding as though he were already a thousand miles away, her father asked what time she’d be home and her mother said same time as always, and her father said what time is that, and her mother said four, and her father grunted. As their voices faded, she marked the moment when she stepped free of her house’s shadow and the sun struck her skin. She kept her eyes straight ahead as she walked between the rows of sagging houses, her heart beating like a drum in counterpoint to her footsteps.

  When she was safely out of sight of the village, she stopped. She stood there, nowhere in particular, loose-jointed and hollow, for three or four minutes, hearing the cicadas without listening to them and looking at a spot on the road a few meters in front of her, where a small stone lay. Then she reached into the pocket of her blouse and took out the sapphire earrings, which she had removed before going home the previous evening. She put them on by feel, still looking at the spot on the road, and then she went over to the stone and picked it up and put it in her pocket. The earrings were glittering in her ears when, a little less than halfway to school, she took a narrow path between the paddies to the bigger road and climbed into the taxi that was waiting there. The door closing behind her sounded like a cannon.

  Nana slid aside on the backseat to make room for her. She was dressed to travel, in the black skirt she’d worn on the day she arrived and a tight red top that looped up over one brown shoulder and left the other bare. The leopard-spotted shoes were back on her feet.

  Kwan said, “You look beautiful.”

  “You’re going to be a lot more beautiful than I’ve ever been.”

  The driver’s eyes flicked to Kwan’s in the rearview mirror, and then he shifted with a grinding of gears, and the car bumped down the road.

  “Before I get on the train,” Kwan said, leaning against the door to increase the distance between them. She had rehearsed the demand in bed the previous night. “I need to know that everything was true. About the house in Bangkok.”

  “It’s worse,” Nana said. “You remember what I told you about what would happen to your father’s money.”

  “You mean, the—” But Nana waved her silent before Kwan said the word “police” and lifted her chin toward the back of the driver’s head.

  “Yes,” Nana said. “Them. They would have taken half, and your father would have gone to the bank for more. To get back what he lost. Do you understand what I mean by the bank?”

  “Yes,” Kwan said. She turned away from Nana to look out the window.

  “He drinks, he plays cards. He’d have gone to the bank three or four times. Every time he gets more money, it takes longer to pay—”

  Kwan rolled down her window. “I said I understand.”

  SHE’S HEARD the train passing by all her life, but she’s never been on one. Nana climbs on board as though the whole thing, all thirty cars of it, has been sent just for her, and she hoists her bright pink bag up onto a shelf above the seats. To Kwan she says, “The bathroom.”

  “I forgot.” The car is dingier than she imagined it would be. The floor has the advanced filthiness of a surface that’s been spit on repeatedly. The windows are so dirty that the world outside looks like she’s seeing it through a glass of tea, and the seats are worn bare wood, wide enough for three narrow rear ends. Hugging her book bag to her chest, she goes to the end of the car, but there’s no bathroom there. She looks back at Nana, who waves briskly for her to keep going. She’s in midstride in the third car, threading the narrow corridor between the rows of seats, when the train lurches into motion and sends her sprawling back, onto a hard wooden seat on her right, the book bag squirting up from beneath her arms. She flails at it and grabs it, and a young man, not handsome but wearing immaculate clothing, looks at her in amused surprise as he scoots toward the window.

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Kwan says, her face hot as fire.

  He smiles at her, a nice smile that contains nothing to be afraid of. “Why? You didn’t start the train.”

  “But I . . . I fell here, and you . . . um, you had to move, and—”

  “It’s fine. Really. Trains do that. If they didn’t, we’d never get anyplace, would we?”

  Absolutely no words come to her mind. “The . . . um, the . . .”

  “The bathroom? Down there.” He points toward the end of the car. “Put your hands on the backs of the seats as you walk. That way when the train goes around a curve, you won’t fall down again.”

  “This thing,” Kwan says, lifting the book bag as though he hasn’t seen it and immediately feeling even more stupid.

  “One hand, then,” he says patiently. “Hold the bag under your left arm and use the right to grab the seat backs.”

  Kwan nods but still can’t think of anything to say. The train is shuddering beneath her feet and making a clacking sound like something chewing rocks. She’s starting to haul herself onto her feet again when he says, “Where are you going?”

  Where is she going? She hasn’t actually asked Nana. “Um,” she says. “Bangkok.” She manages at the last moment not to
turn the word into a question.

  “Where in Bangkok? It’s a big city.”

  Kwan nods and says, “Really big.” And then, since he seems to expect more, she adds, “My aunt’s house.”

  His eyes travel to the sapphire in her right ear and then come back. “That’s good. You’ve got someone waiting for you, then.”

  “Oh, yes. My . . . my aunt.” She wants to fan her face, but she won’t do it.

  “So you said.” He lifts his eyebrows and lets them drop. “Well.”

  “Well,” Kwan says, searching desperately for something to say. “Thank you.”

  He smiles again. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You taught me . . . um, how to walk. On the train, I mean.”

  “You’d have figured it out. So.” The eyebrows go up and down again. “The bathroom.”

  “The bathroom.” And then she’s up, the bag trapped beneath her left arm, taking it one cautious row at a time, her right hand grasping the backs of the seats.

  The bathroom is tiny and dirty, and it smells sweetly awful. She has to lean against the door to get her skirt off, terrified that it’ll swing open beneath her weight and she’ll be standing there in her frayed underpants. Once the skirt is off, she hurries into the jeans, having some trouble with the left leg because there’s nothing to balance herself against except the door, and the train is turning, as the young man said it would. With the jeans finally up and buttoned, she pulls the school blouse over her head and chooses her best T-shirt, the one that nobody else owned before she got it, and slips it on. She looks at herself in the mirror, avoiding her eyes, and smooths the wrinkles in the T-shirt with the palms of her hands. She lifts the blouse by its shoulders to fold it and feel the weight in the pocket. The stone.