The Queen of Patpong pr-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  Rose says, "I'm not contagious, Miaow."

  "Everything was all right," Miaow says. She sounds like she does when she's working on her lines for the play, as though she's practiced what she wants to say, and she swivels the stool back and forth, not looking at either of them, just getting through it. "We were all happy. You had your business, Poke was making money from his book. My school was okay, there was the play."

  "There still is," Rafferty says.

  "And now there's this," Miaow says, finishing her speech as if no one had spoken. "Just when I think we can finally live like everybody else, without being different all the time. Without anybody chasing us. Without being frightened."

  "You don't have to be frightened," Rafferty says.

  She gives him the look of pure, concentrated scorn that the lie deserves. "I saw that guy. And there wasn't just one of them. There were two. Maybe there are a lot more."

  "There aren't," Rose says.

  "You can't know that," Miaow says, and now she's glaring at Rose. "I heard you talking to Poke. This happened when you were… dancing or whatever you call it. And you worked in the bar four years after the last time you saw him. You've been with Poke for five years now. How do you know he hasn't got a hundred friends by now? How do you know anything?"

  Rose leans back on the couch and looks regretfully at the smashed cigarette butt. Miaow's gaze drops to a spot on the carpet about halfway across the room, but her mouth remains a tight line. Rafferty fights the urge to take hold of the conversation, try to turn it away from the black lake that seems to have opened up between them. All his instincts, developed by years of listening as his mother and father sharpened their razors on each other, push him toward trying to find a safe common ground, somewhere they can smile at each other and pretend that nothing happened tonight.

  But he can't do it.

  "Miaow," he finally says. "Nobody is happy about this. But either you can be polite to your mother or you can go back to your room."

  Miaow says, "Fine." She grabs the Coke, downs what's left in a single long series of gulps, and then tosses the empty can over the counter and onto the kitchen floor with a clatter that makes Rose straighten galvanically. Miaow pushes herself off the stool and leaves the room without a glance at either of them.

  Rose is very focused on getting another cigarette. Although Rafferty hasn't moved, she says, "Let her go."

  He gets up in the silence and goes into the kitchen. Miaow had crumpled the can in her hand. He picks it up and puts it, very quietly, into the plastic recycling bag. A thought knocks on his head, goes away, and comes back, so he gives it voice. "Do you want something to drink?"

  From the living room, Rose says, "Whiskey. A big one."

  "I'll join you," he says, although he never drinks whiskey and Rose rarely takes anything stronger than a few sips of beer. At the back of one of the shelves above the counter, he locates a bottle of Crown Royal, a gift from somebody, still unopened in its blue velveteen bag. He's been moving it to look behind it for more than a year. Now he takes it down, tussles thick-fingered with the bag's tightly knotted drawstring, slips the bottle out, and opens it. Two eight-ounce water glasses, soldiers in Rose's hydrating campaign, are drying upside down in the drainer. He fills each of them about one-third full. As he picks them up, tucking the bottle beneath his arm, he realizes that one reason he doesn't drink whiskey is that he hates the smell.

  He comes back into the living room to find Rose firing up the new Marlboro. Two in ten minutes is heavy, even for her, but this doesn't seem like the time for Mr. Healthy Habits to make an appearance, so he just puts down the glasses and the bottle and sits beside her. She looks at the glass, and her brow furrows doubtfully for a moment, but then she picks it up.

  Rafferty extends his own, feeling like a character in a 1940s film. They clink rims, and Rose tosses back almost an inch's worth. She lowers the glass to her lap and sits back, blinking as her eyes water. "Oh," she says, mostly breath. "Oh, that's awful."

  "Here goes." Rafferty gulps some down. The two of them sit there, squinting at each other in shared misery.

  "Together this time," Rose says, and there's a glint of grim humor in her eyes. "On the count of three. One. Two. Now." The glasses come up, the heads go back, and then the glasses come down again and the two of them stare across the living room with the kind of expression they might wear if the floor had disappeared. Rose opens her mouth wide and breathes out to clear the fumes, then says, "Why do people do this?"

  "Well," Rafferty says, "why are we doing it?"

  "Right," Rose says, and drinks again. Rafferty joins her.

  "Or"-Rose makes a face-"maybe it's not worth it." She puts the glass on the table.

  Rafferty says, "Actually, I'm getting the hang of it." He takes another slug.

  "He couldn't have followed us here," Rose says. She lets the sentence hang in the air for a moment and then reaches forward and picks up the glass. She sips it this time, but she takes three sips. She pats at her sternum until she can talk, then says, "For now, we're safe."

  "If he wanted to find us, how would he do it?"

  "He'd start at Patpong," she says. He'd go into every bar on the street. He has-or anyway he had-pictures of me. He'd show them to people and ask if they know where I am now."

  They both drink to the idea, and Rafferty says, "He'd find someone who knows you in ten minutes."

  "Especially because of the employment agency," Rose says. "Lots of girls know about Peachy and me. They think about us as someone they can come to if they ever decide to quit."

  "But they'd know where the office is, not the apartment." He leans over and picks up the bottle, pours some for Rose, and then drinks directly from the bottle's mouth, feeling a fine line of fire burn its way through the center of his chest.

  "Most of them don't even know the office," Rose says. She takes the bottle out of his hand and pours a couple of fingers' worth into his glass. "They've got a telephone number written somewhere. Half the time they won't even have that-they probably wrote it on the palm of their hand and then washed their hands before they copied it onto anything."

  "Okay, but let's say he gets the number," Rafferty says.

  "Because he will," Rose says.

  "He dials it. Either he gets Peachy in person and he asks her for the address, which she gives him, or he gets the answering machine, which tells him he's called your agency. Then he goes to a phone book, and he's got the address. Either way he knows where the office is."

  "Then he waits there," Rose says, and they both drink.

  "So you don't go," Rafferty says.

  "But Peachy would. And Peachy's been here."

  "Peachy wouldn't tell-"

  "Peachy would tell him anything he wanted to know." She raises the glass and lowers it again, the whiskey untasted. "You don't know him, Poke. He'd make her tell. He can make anyone tell him anything."

  There's a sniffle in the hallway, and Miaow says, out of sight, "He'd hurt Peachy?"

  "You might as well know, Miaow," Rose says. "He'd hurt anybody."

  Miaow sticks her head around the corner and looks at them. The teary look gives way to the aspect of her personality Rafferty calls the Disapproving Executive. She says, "You're drinking that stuff?"

  "It's an anesthetic," Rafferty says. "It makes us braver."

  "Then I want some," Miaow says, coming the rest of the way into the room. "And don't tell me I'm a kid. I'm more scared than you are."

  Rafferty can't think of a good enough reason to say no, so he gets up and goes into the kitchen to get Miaow's special glass, which has a color picture of the South Korean pop star Rain printed on it, his shirt strategically open to display the best set of abs on earth. The image bothers Rafferty, but not enough to make an issue out of it. When he comes back into the living room, Miaow is sitting on the couch, leaning against Rose with her eyes closed, and Rose is smoothing her choppy hair. Rafferty guesses he missed the apology.

  Miaow opens her
eyes as he sits. He holds up the glass and says, "Are you sure?"

  Miaow says, "Why not?"

  Rose gives Rafferty a disapproving glance. "You'll learn the answer to that question in a minute."

  Rafferty pours a splash into Miaow's glass.

  Miaow says, "Up to his belly button."

  "Taste it first," Rafferty says, and hands it to her. He and Rose pick up their own glasses, and the three of them, in response to some psychically shared impulse, hoist and drink at the same time.

  Miaow says, "Eeeeeewwwwww." Her face is so twisted it looks like it's being wrung out.

  "It doesn't get better," Rose says.

  Miaow lifts the glass again and sniffs, then quickly puts it down. She scrapes her tongue against her top teeth, trying to get rid of the taste. Then she says, "I'm still scared."

  "He's not going to find this place tonight," Rafferty says. "And tomorrow we'll start making it harder for him to find it at all. But tonight we're okay. We'll wake up early tomorrow and get to work."

  "And I'll tell you about it then," Rose says. "In daylight."

  "Anybody want more?" Rafferty has picked up the bottle. When no one answers, he grabs his glass in his other hand and goes into the kitchen. He turns from the sink to see Miaow standing behind him, holding the other two glasses. He takes them from her and puts them into the sink, and she wraps her arms around his waist and presses the side of her head against his side. He looks down at the raggedy-yellow crop of hair. Sure enough, he can see her part.

  "We're okay," he says. "Go to bed, and everything will be fine."

  Miaow says, "I want to sleep with you and Rose."

  "Fine," Rafferty says, hoping she can't hear his heartbeat double in fury. "We've got lots of room. But don't worry. He won't find us." IT'S A SHARP smell, one he knows he should recognize, but he's functionally impaired until the coffee electrifies his nervous system, and he's still muzzy from the evening's whiskey. The flat, dead reek of Rose's cigarettes takes the edge off the smell and makes it an irritant, like a word he's used a million times and suddenly can't remember. So he stands in the kitchen, his bare shoulder against the cool refrigerator door, and watches the coffee drip.

  He's halfway through the first cup when he thinks he knows what the smell is. At the same moment he hears a knocking at the front door.

  He goes quickly into the bedroom and opens the sliding door in the headboard of the bed. He'd quietly unlocked the safe last night, while Rose was in the bathroom and Miaow was changing for bed, and the Glock is unwrapped and waiting for him. There's no school today, and Rose and Miaow are both asleep, Rose's arm thrown over the child's shoulders. He puts his coffee on the bedside table, transfers the gun to his left hand so it'll be out of sight behind the door, throws Rose's towel over his shoulders, and goes shirtless into the living room. He tries the peephole in the door, but it's blocked, so he racks a shell into the gun's chamber and opens the door a crack with his foot against it. The smell becomes a blunt-force object, almost overwhelming.

  Mrs. Pongsiri stands there, wrapped in a silk kimono, holding a cup of what smells like hot cinnamon. She apparently slept in her bar makeup, and it's smeared on the side of her face that she'd sunk into the pillow. It makes Rafferty feel like he's looking at her through a rippled window.

  "Mr. Rafferty," Mrs. Pongsiri says in English, "do you know about this?"

  "About…?"

  "This." Mrs. Pongsiri indicates the door with a scarlet-tipped hand in a vertical sweeping gesture, top to bottom, bottom to top.

  Rafferty pulls the door toward him and freezes when it's about a third of the way open.

  A thick X runs from corner to corner in a deep blood red. Taped over the peephole is a small, uneven square of cardboard, no more than half an inch to a side, clipped with scissors from something larger. Printed on it in dark gray is the claw of a bird of prey.

  A raptor.

  Chapter 4

  Wampire

  "He's having fun," Rose says, giving the word a bitter twist. "Terrifying people, threatening them. Playing with them. This is his idea of a joke."

  It's a few minutes after 10:00 A.M., and the day is well into its long, slow sizzle. The living room is bright enough to make Rafferty, whiskey-sensitive, wish he were wearing dark glasses. Rose is curled on the couch, brown knees drawn up protectively, wearing a man's T-shirt, size quadruple-X, with a picture of Wile E. Coyote on it, above a pair of cutoff jeans. Circles are thumb-smudged beneath her eyes. Miaow, who's barely spoken all morning, sits perched on the edge of the chair at Rafferty's desk, decked out in one of her usual immaculate weekend outfits: pressed lemon-yellow jeans and a severely white T-shirt, unsullied by anything as vulgar as a design. Rafferty can't see himself, and he has no idea what he's wearing.

  Sunday or not, Arthit is in uniform. For the past eight months, he's been putting in six- and sometimes seven-day weeks. His face looks crumpled. He's lost at least six kilos, and the lines on his forehead and around his eyes and mouth have deepened. He could probably slip four fingers inside the buttoned collar of his shirt.

  For the first time since they met, Rafferty thinks, his friend looks old.

  "Howard Horner," Arthit says. "And you think he's military."

  Rafferty looks to Rose, but she says nothing, so he says, "Has to be."

  "He never talked about it," Rose finally says. "He said he was in business, but he looked like a soldier."

  Arthit says, "Do you actually know whether that's his name? Did you ever see anything with his name on it? A passport, driver's license, anything?"

  "No," Rose says. "But that was his name. His cell phone rang all the time, and he answered it, 'Horner.' Not hello or anything, just Horner. Like he was the only one in the world."

  "That's all?"

  "No," she says, after a moment. "They called him Mr. Horner at his hotel." She plucks the bottom of the T-shirt and looks down at Wile E. Coyote. "At all the hotels."

  "Need a passport to check in to a hotel," Rafferty says. There's a faint pulse beating at his right temple. "So he's got a passport that says 'Horner' anyway."

  "And he came and went, you said." Arthit is on the hassock with his notebook positioned in front of him on the glass-topped table. He's made half a page of notes.

  "He'd usually stay a month or so," Rose says. "Then he'd be gone for a while and come back."

  "How long between visits?"

  "Maybe three months, maybe more." She squints into the past. "Maybe less. It's hard to say. I hadn't been in Bangkok long. Everything was new to me. Some weeks felt like months, some months felt like days. I was fighting for my life in the bar, trying to figure out how to tell friends from enemies, trying to get over being terrified all the time. I wasn't keeping track of anything, just trying to get through the nights."

  "Don't think about that one for a minute," Arthit says. "Maybe it'll come. When did you first see him?"

  Rose rubs her upper arms as though she's cold, although the living-room temperature is into the eighties. "A few weeks after I got here. I know that because it was near my birthday. I got here in July, and my birthday is in September."

  "That's how many years ago?"

  "Thirteen." She glances at Rafferty. "No. Fourteen. I've been with Poke five years."

  "So he came into the bar," Arthit prompts.

  "I don't want to talk about that. I mean, I do, but I need to explain things to Poke and Miaow, not just answer questions like this."

  "Fine," Arthit says. "Can you remember anything he said about himself? What he did, where he went when he left here, anything like that?"

  "He told me he came from England."

  "He's American," Rafferty and Miaow correct her, almost in unison.

  Rose straightens, looking from one of them to the other. "I know," she says. "I didn't know then that there was a part of America called England."

  "There isn't," Miaow says. It's nearly a snap.

  "New England?" Arthit asks.

  Ros
e nods but doesn't speak. She's gazing at Miaow, who's searching for something in her own lap. Finally Rose says, "Yes. New England. Someplace with a V. I remember that because he laughed at the way I pronounced it. I said"-her face clears for a moment as she remembers-"Wermont. I called it Wermont."

  "Like wampire," Arthit says. "Thais say wampire."

  "Like that," Rose says, the animation fading from her face. "Wermont." She makes a knot out of her fingers. "Wampire."

  "When he was here for these-what? — one-month stays…"

  "Something like that. Sometimes longer."

  "Did he ever leave the country for a short time, a few days, and come back? Would we find multiple entries in immigration?"

  "No," Rose says.

  "Here a month or more, every time. No need to go back to wherever he earned his living. You're sure."

  "I'm sure," Rose says, and buries the lower half of her face in her coffee cup.

  "How?" Arthit asks.

  Rose looks at Miaow and then lets her eyes slide to the floor. "Because I was with him."

  "The whole time?"

  "Yes. He paid the bar fine for a month in advance every time," she says.

  Arthit makes a note, but Rafferty recognizes it as just something to do, a way of masking his discomfort. Rafferty, who is standing beside the kitchen counter, goes into the kitchen and tops up his cup, which is still full. He doesn't want to go back into the living room. What he wants to do is leave the apartment, go out into the oven of the day, find Howard Horner, and kill him. Kill the other one-what was his name? — John. Kill John, too.

  But he breathes several times all the way to the depth of his belly and goes back in. Instead of stopping at the counter, he goes to the couch and sits next to Rose. Puts a hand on the smooth warmth of her thigh. Rose doesn't seem to notice.

  "Why is this important?" he asks Arthit. "Whether he came and went, I mean."

  "It's a pattern," Arthit says. "It feels military, or quasi-military. So many months on, a month off."

  "Either he's military or he was," Rafferty says. "All you have to do is see him walk."