The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

  He, Arthit, and Rose are in Arthit’s living room, Arthit on the couch and Rose in the armchair that matches the one Rafferty just vacated. There’s a clatter from the kitchen, where Miaow and Pim are unpacking take-out food and laying out plates and utensils. It’s quarter past six.

  “I only got them an hour ago.” Arthit stands, too, unwilling to give Rafferty the height advantage. “They’re on rush, they’ll be ready soon. But I don’t know whether I’ll let you have them.”

  “Whether you’ll—”

  “This can’t continue. It’s time for the cops.”

  Several responses go through Rafferty’s mind, all of them hurtful. He says, “Let me call Elson.”

  “Poke.” Arthit stops, breathes deeply, and continues. “What in the world does an American Secret Service agent have to do with any of this?”

  Rafferty says, “I want this guy to go down. Forever.”

  “And I don’t? Every time the phone rings, there’s another dead girl in those records in Phuket.”

  “They found Oom,” Rose tells Rafferty. “The right time, the tattoo.”

  Arthit says, “You don’t trust the police? The Thai justice system?”

  Rafferty doesn’t even think about it. “No.”

  His face reddening, Arthit says, “You’re slandering a lot of good people.”

  “If the police are such crackerjacks, tell me how a dozen bodies, or however many it is, all killed the same way, can just wash up in Phuket, like Japanese glass fishing floats, with nobody hearing about it?”

  Arthit’s shaking his head by the time Rafferty is halfway through the sentence. “That’s different.”

  “How? How is it—”

  “Phuket is a tourist destination. It’s still recovering from the tsunami. They’re not going to publicize a serial—”

  “Oh, well, that inspires confidence. Let the girls die, but, please, no bad PR.”

  “They were working the case,” Arthit says, barely moving his lips. “But quietly.”

  “And look at all the progress.”

  Arthit holds up both hands. “You can argue with me until the sun comes up. The police are getting involved. Now.”

  “If you bring the cops into this, you’ll regret it until you die.”

  “This country is not completely corrupt, no matter what you believe.”

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Rafferty says, “I don’t trust my government either.”

  Rose says, “He should be dead.”

  They both look at her. Arthit is expressionless, wearing what Rafferty thinks of as his cop face. “Obviously, I can’t guarantee that,” Arthit tells her. “But what are you saying, Poke? That if the police aren’t involved, you’re going to kill him?”

  “Here’s what I’m saying: Your colleagues may catch him, but they won’t keep him. Where are you going?”

  Halfway to the dining room, Arthit says, “You dodged my question. That’s another reason for me to do what I should have done this afternoon.”

  “He’ll never see a Thai courtroom,” Rafferty says.

  “I’m not a judge,” Arthit says. He picks up his cell phone from the dining-room table. “I don’t try them, I just arrest them.”

  Rafferty raises his voice, knowing it means he’s losing the argument. “He killed four women— Wait, how many is it now?”

  Rose says, “Five.”

  “All cut?”

  “Just like Oom,” Rose says.

  “Okay, then, five women. Five that we know of. And you said it yourself, Arthit, there are going to be more. He tried to kill Rose. He and the other one cut and beat a woman in her sixties just because she came down the hall to see what the noise was.”

  Arthit says, “All the more reason to catch him.”

  “They tried to steal my daughter so she could lead them to Rose. What would they have done to Rose? What do you think they would have done with Miaow afterward? Buy her candy?” Rafferty hears the stridency in his voice but can’t modulate it. “She’s a kid, Arthit.”

  Arthit lowers the phone. “Listen to yourself. Look at the case against Horner, the one you’ve just laid out. Look at the witnesses: Rose, about both her and Oom. You and two cops, about what happened to you and Miaow today. Mrs. Pongsiri, since the doctors seem to think she’ll make it. He’ll never see daylight again.”

  “He’ll never stand trial,” Rafferty says. “He’ll get sold.”

  Arthit says, “Sold?”

  “Like the cheapest car on the lot.”

  “To whom, Poke?” Arthit’s mouth is pinched tight. “Think about it for a minute. Even if my colleagues were corrupt enough, or stupid enough, to sell a serial killer after all the publicity this case will get, who’d have enough money? Because for that kind of corruption, we’re talking seven figures, and I don’t mean baht.”

  Rose says, “He only killed bar girls. That’s not the same as killing people.”

  Rafferty says, “Let me call Elson.”

  Arthit starts to reply to Rose and then looks from her to Rafferty. Something seems to unfold behind his eyes. He puts the cell phone on the polished table and spins it with his forefinger. Glances down at it and then back over at Rafferty. He says, “You’re shitting me.”

  “Let me make the call.”

  Arthit spins the phone again, giving it all his attention. “You can’t mean what I think you mean. But even if you do, it’s not going to change anything.”

  “Then there’s no reason not to call.”

  “This is your government we’re talking about.”

  “Times have changed,” Rafferty says. “My government has changed with them.” He pulls out his own cell phone just as Pim and Miaow come into the room, each carrying a big tray full of take-out containers, plates, and glasses. Miaow has cleaned herself up from the scuffle of the afternoon and is once again the kind of shiny-faced immaculate that Rafferty always associates with her, but her eyes are a little too quick, a little too skittish. She looks as if a loud noise would send her diving through the window. Pim has discarded her garish street clothes in favor of one of Arthit’s T-shirts as a dress, belted with a necktie. The shirt comes down almost to her knees.

  Rafferty looks at the necktie and tries to lower the room’s temperature by asking, “Are those snakes?”

  “Cobras,” Arthit says. “Thanom gave it to me for Christmas. I think there was some sort of threat implied.”

  “Can you make room on the table?” Miaow asks. “These are heavy.”

  Arthit says, from the dining room, “Over here.”

  “Listen,” Rafferty says. “I need everybody to be quiet. I’m putting this call on speaker, but I’m not going to tell the guy I’m talking to. He’d have a heart attack.”

  He waits until Miaow and Pim have put down the trays, and then he waves everyone quiet again and dials. On the third ring, he checks his watch—6:21 P.M.—but then Elson picks up.

  Rafferty raises the phone to his lips so he won’t sound like he’s on speaker. “Richard. Poke Rafferty.”

  Elson says, “Yeah?” He sounds like someone who expects to be asked for a loan.

  “And a big hi to you, too.”

  “You’re calling after hours. Means you don’t want to talk on an office phone. How’d you get my cell number?”

  “You gave it to me. Back when Frank—my father—was here.”

  “You should have torn it up.”

  “You should have changed it. But how’s this? I’ll erase it after this call.”

  Elson sighs into the phone. “What is it, then?”

  “It’s a hypothetical.”

  “I’ve been waiting all day for a hypothetical.”

  “Good. Then I’ll lay it out and you tell me how probable or improbable it is.”

  There’s a pause, and then Elson says, “Do you need a prompt to get started?”

  “No. Okay, a guy working for a defense contractor, let’s say Grayhawk or one of those, he’s engaged on missions for t
he U.S. in . . . oh, I don’t know, the Middle East, and while he’s in a third country—”

  “Third?”

  “Neither the U.S. nor the country his mission is in.”

  “Okay.”

  “So in this third country he gets into very serious trouble. Let’s say he kills several people. Kills them ugly. Let’s say they’re defenseless women. Let’s say there are more than several.”

  In the silence that follows, Rafferty can hear Elson doing something that sounds like jingling the change in his pocket. “Is this public knowledge? In your hypothetical, I mean.”

  “No. Nobody’s heard a word about it except the people who are directly involved. And then let’s say he’s arrested in the third country and the American embassy is contacted as a courtesy, as they always are.”

  For a moment Rafferty thinks Elson has hung up. But then he says, “Yes?”

  “How improbable is it that the U.S. would make a secret arrangement to spirit him out?”

  “As opposed, for instance, to having a sensational trial that they can’t control.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All right, let me make sure I have this straight. An employee of an American contractor, on a mission in, hypothetically, Afghanistan, does something horrific in another country, hypothetically Thailand, and the issue is whether, either in the State Department or in the Department of Defense, there might be a black-ops budget with minimum oversight, so nobody with any rank would be involved if the situation blew up in their faces, and whether that hypothetical budget has money in it that could be used to yank that contractor out of the third country before the media circus makes the U.S. look like bloodthirsty savages and the Senate starts demanding hearings into the war effort and secret budgets and the impeachment of the president. Umm, let’s see, and that there are also people in the right places who have access to that budget and would be willing to spend it. Is that about it?”

  “Very good.”

  “And also reopen the whole basic issue about contractors.”

  “Which issue?”

  “About how they’re not there because they were drafted. About how they volunteered and even competed for a slot where their basic job is to kill people. And about how there are always going to be psychopaths among them, no matter how stridently the people in charge deny it.”

  Arthit’s eyes meet Rafferty’s.

  “Yeah,” Rafferty says. “All those issues.”

  “And you want to know what, exactly?”

  “How improbable it is that the government would spring a guy like that.”

  “Hmmm.” Rafferty can envision the reflection on Elson’s glasses as he lifts his chin, the man’s thin lips tightening as he thinks. “Tell you what. There’s no commonly accepted index for improbability that I know about. So why don’t you give me an example of something improbable, and I’ll tell you whether your scenario is less or more improbable than that.”

  Rafferty looks up to find Arthit’s eyes still on him. Arthit mouths one word: Frank.

  Rafferty nods and says, “Off the top of my head, okay? Let’s say a U.S. government agency takes an Anglo man who needs to hide out for the rest of his life and assigns him a false identity that was originally set up for a Chinese man, without even changing the Chinese man’s name, although the guy hiding out isn’t Chinese. As improbable as that?”

  “It’s exactly that improbable. And you wouldn’t believe how improbably large that budget would be, if there were such a budget.”

  “Improbable as it is, what would happen to the contractor after he was returned to the States?”

  “Whatever it would be,” Elson says, “you’d never hear about it. Are you finished?”

  Rafferty says, “Am I ever,” and hangs up.

  From the dining room, Miaow says, “But that’s what he did with your father. He gave him—”

  “That’s right,” Rafferty says.

  Arthit says, “I need to think about this.”

  “Think about it fast,” Rose says, getting up and going into the dining room. “The girls will be here any minute. Miaow, we need more glasses and things.”

  Arthit says, “The girls?”

  “I really need those pictures, Arthit,” Rafferty says.

  Arthit shakes his head as though he needs to clear it. “What girls?”

  “From my agency,” Rose says. “At least eight more glasses, Miaow. And, Pim, could you please make some tea?”

  “How come you say please to Pim but not to me?” Miaow asks, heading for the kitchen.

  Rose says, “Because I like her better.”

  Miaow makes a rude noise as she leaves the room.

  “I don’t need a maid,” Arthit says. “I told Poke I don’t—”

  “You certainly do need a maid,” Rose says. “This place is ‘man clean,’ but that’s not the same as clean. Why don’t you hire Pim?”

  “Pim, Pim, Pim,” Miaow says from the kitchen. Scarlet-faced, Pim flees the room.

  Arthit says, quite loudly, “Everybody. Stop.”

  Everybody stops except Pim, who runs all the way to the kitchen. The moment stretches out, totally silent. Arthit blinks in surprise.

  Rafferty says, “What now, Arthit? Can we start again?”

  “At least with the food and the glasses,” Rose says.

  There’s a knock at the door. Rafferty pulls out his Glock, which has been tucked into his waistband ever since he got there.

  Rose says, “What? You’re going to shoot Fon?”

  “You stay where you are. I’ll answer the door.” Rafferty puts the gun hand behind his back and crosses the room, and he finds Arthit beside him, his own gun in hand. When they get to the door, Arthit waves Rafferty aside so he’ll be right behind the door when it opens, turns sideways to hide his gun and present a smaller target, and, with a nod to Rafferty, yanks the door open.

  Fon takes a surprised step back and says, “Hi.”

  Chapter 27

  We’re Going to Create a Storm

  There are nine of them in all, and Rose’s partner, Peachy, makes ten. With the exception of Peachy, who’s wearing enough makeup to sing opera, the women are scrubbed and natural, their hair pulled back simply into ponytails or braids. Fon’s hair has been gathered on top of her head and rubber-banded, the hair exploding straight up and then fanning out like a little black volcano. Except for two of them, Fon and Rose, they retain little of the allure they’d once projected onstage in the bars of Patpong. Some of them are so determinedly plain it looks intentional, a way of erasing who they were in the past.

  They’re sitting on the floor, most of them with their feet tucked politely to one side, each with a cup of tea or one of Miaow’s dwindling supply of Cokes. Five or six of them are smoking, as is Rose. Every time Miaow comes into the room, she fans her hand and makes a face. A few of the women blow smoke at her.

  A piece of paper is being passed from hand to hand. One of the women scans it and says, “The Kit-Kat.”

  “Good,” Rafferty says, writing it on his own piece of paper. “That’s twenty-seven.”

  Fon says, “What’s that upstairs place up near Surawong? Used to be the Baby Bar?”

  “The Lap Bar,” Rafferty says. “We’ve got it.”

  “I’m getting old,” Fon says. “That’s where you and Arthit went to scare my little sister. I’ve blanked it from my mind. And it was only a few days ago.”

  “Poke terrified her,” Arthit says from his chair at the dining-room table, where he’s watching the proceedings with a certain amount of bemusement.

  “He has that effect on women,” Rose says. She looks at her own list. “I’ve got twenty-eight. The Lap Bar makes twenty-nine.”

  “The Butterfly,” says one of the other women. “And Lolita’s, ugh. And I think Poke’s cute.”

  Writing the names of the bars, Rafferty says, “I think I’m cute, too. I’ve only got twenty-eight.”

  “So I’ve got one more than you do,” Rose says to him
. “Why don’t I read my list, and everybody try to figure out if we’re missing any.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Rafferty gets up from the floor, feeling as if every muscle in his body has been hammered by dwarfs. He walks stiffly down the hallway to the kitchen, where Pim and Miaow are tossing paper plates and scraping leftovers into Baggies. “This is what I like to see,” he says. “The next generation of womanhood, turning its back on feminism.”

  Miaow shows him a white container that holds about an ounce of some kind of chicken with sauce. “Is this worth keeping?”

  “Was it good?”

  She shrugs. “It was okay.”

  “Gimme.” He takes it away from her and picks up a used plastic fork.

  Miaow says, “Eeeeewww. Disgusting.”

  “We are all one,” Rafferty says, wiggling his eyebrows mysteriously, and Pim laughs. “You’re right,” he says, eating. “It’s just okay. How’s your head?”

  “If we’re all one,” Miaow says, “you shouldn’t have to ask.”

  “I guess that means you’re all right.” He scrapes up the rest of the chicken, which has turned out to be lobster. “You were great today,” he says.

  “When?”

  “On the stage. As Ariel.”

  The hand in which Miaow held the food container is still extended, but she’s forgotten it. She says, “Really?”

  “Really. You’re the best thing in the play, and Mrs. Shin knows it.”

  “Siri’s good,” Miaow says with a sideways glance at him.

  “Miaow. She’s awful. She’s pretty, but she thinks she’s in a silent movie.”

  “Are you really acting in a play?” Pim asks.

  “Sort of.” Miaow is suddenly very busy wiping her hands on her jeans.

  “I always wanted to be a movie star,” Pim says. She blushes a deep red.

  “It’s only a school play,” Miaow says. She is talking directly to the tabletop. “Just kids.”

  Pim says, “Still.”

  “She’s terrific,” Rafferty says. “You can come with us when we go to see it.”

  Miaow straightens slightly, but then she gives Pim a quick look, sees just a normal, everyday, plump teenager in a T-shirt, and her shoulders relax.