The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Miaow hates her.”

  Mrs. Shin nods matter-of-factly. “She’s got a lot of company. Siri is not a girl’s girl.”

  Rafferty says, “I’m just glad I’m not her father.”

  Mrs. Shin gives him a quizzical glance. “And Mia?”

  “Well, Miaow’s difficult sometimes, but it’s a different kind of difficult.”

  “For the moment,” Mrs. Shin says, and now it’s Rafferty’s turn to look at her.

  “You think?”

  “Absolutely. She’ll probably never be tall, but she’s going to be a beauty.”

  Rafferty looks up at the top of the rock, where he can just see the chopped-yellow crown of his daughter’s head. She’s sitting where she always sits, all by herself on the highest step of the metal stairway that leads to her entrance. “Really.”

  “Take my word. I’m an expert on how they’ll grow up. I’ve been watching it for years.” She leans forward and calls out, “Luther. Siri. Let’s have it out loud and in your places.” Luther hobbles downstage, and Rafferty can almost hear his joints creak. Siri drifts weightlessly toward center stage, which is her favorite place. “Ellen”—Mrs. Shin’s voice is louder—“give me the cave lights.”

  The inside of the cave takes on a pale color halfway between a peach and the inside of a conch shell.

  Rafferty says, “Pretty.”

  Mrs. Shin says “Shhh” again, focused on the stage. Luther has launched into the story, much shortened by Rafferty, of how his brother betrayed him and stole his dukedom, in connivance with the king of Naples, and how Prospero and Miranda wound up cast away on this benighted island. He is interrupted by dutiful interjections from Siri, as Miranda, who is herself interrupted by Mrs. Shin, who reminds her that the people in the back of the theater will want to hear her, too. It is, Rafferty thinks, one of the worst scenes Shakespeare ever wrote.

  He says, “Still feels too long, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s been too long for four hundred years.” Mrs. Shin slips sideways out of the row and goes down to the edge of the orchestra pit at the foot of the stage. The actors break off and look at her. “I want you guys to pick it up by about ten percent,” she says. “We’ll move on now, but as soon as you’re both offstage, I need you to run through it a few times, just speeding it up. Here’s the motivation: Luther, you’re eager to get through it so you can talk to Ariel and find out about the storm. Let the intensity speed you up. Siri, maybe you can cut him off with some of your lines, because as good a daughter as you are, you’re a kid, you’re impatient—”

  “This is important material,” Luther says. He was born to be forty. He’s watched anxiously as his big opening scene has been snipped like substandard yardage. “The audience needs to hear it.”

  “They need to be awake, too,” Mrs. Shin says. “You guys are doing great, but this scene is a big, indigestible lump of exposition, and we haven’t solved it yet. Okay?”

  Siri says placidly, “When will I get my real costume?”

  “When it’s finished,” Mrs. Shin says, a bit shortly. She smiles, taking the sting out of it. “Siri, why don’t you go backstage and think about how to hurry this scene along? That way you’ll be ahead of Luther when he’s finished out here.”

  Siri nods and floats off stage left, where a sun-dappled meadow probably awaits her. Even Luther, whose developing sexuality seems to be taking an interesting direction, watches her go.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Shin says, clapping her hands. “Lights ready? Ellen?”

  “Ready!” a girl shouts.

  “Mia?”

  Miaow stands up, high on the rock, looking even smaller than usual, and says, “I’m here,” and then disappears again.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Mrs. Shin backs up the aisle, still facing the stage, with her right arm behind her back, fingers crossed. The peach color inside the cave is replaced by a chilly steel blue, and the cyclorama darkens ominously to slate gray. A bright spot of light hits the top of the rock, where Miaow had been standing, and Mrs. Shin calls out, “Ellen. Not till you see her. Where’s our sound?”

  “Sorry,” a boy says from stage right.

  “Put the light on the cyclorama back the way it was,” Mrs. Shin says. “I want to see this whole transition come together. Luther, you cue everything. Everybody ready?”

  A general chorus of readiness from all over the theater as the cyclorama brightens, and then Mrs. Shin claps again and says, “From ‘Come away,’ Luther. Go.”

  Luther cramps his way stage left, toward the bottom of the stairway, and says, “ ‘Come away, servant, come; I am ready now. Approach, my Ariel, come.’ ”

  The sky darkens and the onstage lights dim, and Rafferty hears a howling wind, punctuated by crashing waves, and suddenly there’s a sunburst at the very top of the rock as Miaow, wearing a waist-length shirt of little mirrors above black tights, is transfigured by a pure white spotlight, and she lifts her arms high, the brilliant mirrors flung out like an exploding star, and says, “ ‘All hail, great master! grave sir, hail!’ ” and Rafferty gets goose bumps.

  “That works,” Mrs. Shin says as she resumes her seat. “That’ll wake them up.”

  Miaow is maneuvering her way down the uneven, curving staircase as though she’s been walking it her entire life, throwing off points of light as effortlessly as she throws off her lines. The spotlight follows her, and down below, Luther realizes he’s not standing in his own light and makes the adjustment.

  “Look at her,” Mrs. Shin says proudly. “She doesn’t even check to see where she’s putting her feet.”

  “She’s been in more dangerous places than this,” Rafferty says.

  “She’s going to be wonderful.”

  Four feet from the bottom of the stairway, Miaow makes a flying leap to the stage floor, leaving behind the follow spot, whose operator hadn’t expected the jump. Mrs. Shin, who hadn’t been expecting it either, starts and emits a mild “Eek.” Miaow is all over the stage now, owning it, swooping and diving ceaselessly as she describes the storm she caused, the storm that drove onto the island the boat containing Prospero’s evil brother and the king of Naples. As he watches and listens, Rafferty begins to feel an odd kind of tension, the sort of low-level electrical charge he experiences in his scalp and skin when he’s close to working his way through a problem. Despite the sensation, which definitely demands attention, he’s distracted by something very different in Miaow’s voice, a quality that’s nothing like how she had played the lines when he helped her learn them. He looks up at the stage and then glances over at Mrs. Shin to find her leaning on the back of the row of seats in front of them, staring at Miaow as though the entire speech is new, something Shakespeare, against all odds, just wrote.

  “What in the world is she doing?” Mrs. Shin asks, although Rafferty doesn’t think the question is addressed to him.

  Miaow is certainly doing something. The tale of how she bewitched the ship and made all aboard terrified that they were about to drown, how she drove them to leap into the raging sea, and how she dispersed them around the island in small groups, is told with white-hot fury, as tightly focused as the flame from an acetylene torch. When she assures Prospero that the shipwrecked courtiers are all safe on solid ground, their clothing not even wet, she sounds bitterly regretful, as though she’d rather report they’d been flayed alive one at a time and their skins hung over bushes to dry. When, in answer to a question from Prospero, she describes the king’s son sitting and sighing on a rock, “ ‘His arms in this sad knot,’ ” she accompanies the words with a petulant crossing of her arms, and she gets a laugh from offstage. Somebody else whistles, perhaps at the sheer amount of energy Miaow has just generated.

  There’s a silence. Luther has been so busy watching Miaow that he’s forgotten his line. Now he turns to face the audience and asks, “Is she going to do it like that?”

  “Good question,” Mrs. Shin says, moving back into the aisle. “Mia. Where did that come from
?”

  Miaow takes a step back and looks down at the stage floor, and the spotlight goes out, and she’s just a little girl again. Rafferty thinks she’s going to retreat into sullenness. But she says, “Ariel hates them. She hates all of them.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re bad. Look what they did. How they stole everything from Prospero. How they put him and the baby—I mean Miranda, who didn’t know anything and never hurt anybody—into a leaky boat and tried . . . tried to drown them. In the ocean. Like kittens nobody wants.”

  Rafferty feels a blaze of love for his daughter, but that little zigzag of electricity returns. Something he’s missing . . .

  “But Ariel doesn’t care about Prospero, Mia,” Mrs. Shin says reasonably. “It doesn’t really matter to her whether Prospero succeeds in trapping his brother. Remember, Prospero is Ariel’s master. He enslaved her, didn’t he?”

  “But first he rescued her,” Miaow says, and her eyes dart to Rafferty for an instant, and then she looks down at the floor again. “And he . . . uh, he taught her stuff. And he took care of her.”

  Rafferty wants to get up and vault over the orchestra pit and hug his daughter, but she wouldn’t speak to him for days. He hears Mrs. Shin talking to Miaow, but he’s not following the words, he’s thinking about the play. Prospero brought his enemies to his island. He didn’t search out his enemies. He brought them to him.

  He brought them to him.

  Chapter 24

  Little Designs Here and There

  On the phone Arthit says, “We’ve found three so far.”

  Rafferty is jammed up against the door on the passenger side of the cab, the bandaged elbow lifted awkwardly over his chest so he doesn’t lean on it. The driver’s seat is pushed all the way back, so Miaow had volunteered to sit behind it, but now she’s toppled sideways, her head on her arm and her eyes closed. She’s probably exhausted from the energy she burned on the stage. Her yellowish chop of hair is inches from Rafferty’s knee, and it takes an effort not to rest a protective hand on it. But he doesn’t want to wake her, and she’d hate it anyway, so he concentrates on speaking quietly into the phone. “That was quick,” he says.

  “I found a Phuket cop who’s been assigned to an inactive post, and I offered him money. You owe me ten thousand baht, by the way. And he’s only started.”

  “Inactive posts” are a uniquely Thai way of saving institutional face while dealing with the inept or the haplessly corrupt who get caught in plain sight; they’re assigned to an empty desk in front of a bare wall and have to show up every day to punch the clock and sit there as they slowly descend into madness. The poor guy in Phuket probably leaped at the offer.

  “You think there will be more?” Rafferty is looking out the window at a surprising flow of traffic for 4:00 P.M. They’re doing maybe ten, twelve kilometers per hour.

  “What I think is that he found records of three dead girls in about four hours,” Arthit says. “Horner has been coming in and out of the country several times a year for almost twelve years. So yes, I think there will be more.”

  “And they match his dates here.”

  “So far. All either while he was here or within ten days after he left. The one who was found late had been in the water longer than the others.”

  “Any identities?”

  “No. But they’re all in their late teens or early twenties. Right in the range.”

  Rafferty glances over at Miaow, whose eyes are still closed, and cups the phone, bringing it so close to his mouth that his lips brush it. “What about cause of death?”

  “They all had knife wounds. No real autopsies, so we don’t know whether they were alive when they went into the water.”

  “When you say knife wounds . . .”

  “I mean carved. Thirty or forty cuts. Shallow, deep, straight, curved. Little designs here and there. Wounds that would have taken time. He enjoyed himself.”

  “There would have been a lot of screaming,” Rafferty says, practically whispering. He feels the driver’s eyes on him in the mirror, and he stares back. The man, a turbaned Sikh, returns his gaze to the road. “No wonder he keeps going back to those rocks.”

  Arthit says, “There will be more, Poke.”

  “Son of a bitch. He almost had Rose.”

  “And if she’s right,” Arthit says, “he’s got another one picked out right now.”

  “I’ve got some thoughts about how to nail him. If he hasn’t already killed the new one, I mean.”

  “Officer Inactive Post is looking now at the period of time when Horner took that girl Oom out of the Candy Cane. Rose says Oom had a little tattoo, a heart, on her shoulder blade. All the girls are tattooed these days, but it was unusual back then. Even without an autopsy, somebody would have made a note of the tattoo. He’s going through the case files, such as they are. So we’ll see.”

  “See what?”

  “Whether we can make this official. Get cops on it, above the table, not like Kosit and Anand.”

  “I need to think about that.”

  “Poke, I’m a cop. If we’ve got a witness who says Horner tried to kill her, and a body that’s got the same tattoo as a girl he took to Phuket, there’s a solid case. I’m going to have to bring the department in.”

  “One thing at a time, okay?” Rafferty says, “So far you haven’t got it all.”

  “But I might in about ten minutes,” Arthit says. He speaks more softly, a sign he wants to be listened to. “And just to remind you, there may be a girl right now who’s—”

  “Hold it,” Rafferty says. The cab is slowing and slanting left, toward the curb. “What’s happening?” he asks the driver.

  The man behind the wheel avoids looking in the rearview mirror and shrugs. He says, “Sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” The car stops next to a black SUV, a Land Rover or some other hulk. “Why are you stopping?” Rafferty leans forward, over the seat back, and on the driver’s seat, an inch or two from the man’s thigh, is a small digital print of a color photo: him and Miaow emerging from Mrs. Shin’s soi.

  Rafferty grabs the driver’s shoulder, but the doors to the black SUV open and two very large men climb out. They’re wearing camouflage pants, tight T-shirts, and motorcycle helmets with reflective visors, and the nearest one yanks open the door of Rafferty’s cab and wraps big hands around Miaow’s ankles.

  She comes awake with a scream, instinctively kicking at the man’s hands, but the man manages to snag the cuff of her jeans, and then he grasps the leg in both hands and pulls, putting his back into it, and Miaow, flailing with her one free leg, starts to slide across the backseat as the cab glides slowly into motion again. Rafferty manages to get his hands beneath her arms and pull, but the door behind him opens, and he pitches backward until he bumps up against someone—the second man—and an unyielding arm goes around his throat. The arm tightens until it cuts off his air, and he reflexively reaches up with one hand to pry it loose. Miaow pops out of his grip. She’s snatching at everything in sight, but she’s no match for the other man’s strength, and she slips away, toward the open door. Flailing wildly, she starts to scream again, but then her shoulders clear the edge of the seat and she falls, the back of her head striking the bottom of the door with a sound like a cracking egg, and the next thing Rafferty knows, she’s lying faceup on the pavement. The car continues to creep forward.

  The man bends down to pick her up.

  Rafferty reaches behind himself and finds the handle of the open door. He bangs it repeatedly against the man who’s choking him, hitting his bad elbow against the front seat each time, but he hasn’t got a good enough angle to do any damage. Still, it’s an irritant, and the man shifts his weight to yank Rafferty out, and instead of resisting, Rafferty jams his legs against the driver’s seat and shoves himself backward with all his strength. The man behind him, prepared for resistance, is sent staggering, obviously into the traffic lane, because there’s a squeal of brakes, and he lets go of Rafferty’s ne
ck.

  Rafferty turns and grabs the man’s nearer hand, yanks it into the cab, and slams the door on the wrist, which is full of delicate little bones. The door rebounds open, and there’s a rewarding bellow of pain, followed by the clamor of crumpling metal and breaking glass as one car rear-ends another.

  Rafferty’s almost out of the cab, pulling himself through the door Miaow vanished through, but she’s four or five feet behind now, because the cab has continued to creep forward. As he slips through the door, he leans over and slugs the driver as hard as he can on the nape of the neck, just beneath the edge of the turban. The man’s head snaps back and then forward, and he instinctively jams on the brakes so that Rafferty, prepared to move forward when he hits the pavement, is left windmilling his arms for balance.

  The man who pulled Miaow from the cab is crouching beside her, slipping his arms beneath her shoulders and knees, so he’s defenseless when she rolls onto her side and sinks both hands into his trousers at the crotch. His knees straighten convulsively, and Miaow comes up with him, dangling from his testicles, as the other man, the man whose wrist Rafferty just tried to break, blindsides Rafferty and knocks him sprawling. Rafferty lands heavily on the asphalt, his head ringing, and the man sidesteps to Rafferty’s midsection, lifts a booted foot, and drives it into Rafferty’s solar plexus. Then he does it again.

  Rafferty’s head and knees snap upward as though he’s being folded in half. He feels like he’s been yanked inside out and everything he’s ever eaten in his life is coming back up, and he’s vaguely aware of the cab rolling around the corner of a soi.

  He rolls to one elbow—the bad one—to vomit, but the man above him grabs Rafferty’s hair with both hands, hauling his shoulders up off the asphalt, and Rafferty reaches back, squeezes the bad wrist, and twists, trying to rotate the damaged bones. The man roars and tries to yank free. The other guy is backing away from Miaow now, dragging her along on the road’s surface, her hands knotted on his scrotum. She’s emitting a high, earsplitting squeal, as even and unvarying as an electronic alarm. Her assailant brings up a hand and hits her with a heavy slap that rocks her head and loosens her grip, and she pitches forward onto her stomach. The man brings back a foot to kick her.