The Queen of Patpong pr-4

by Timothy Hallinan

  He's swimming again, maybe ten or fifteen meters from the rocks.

  And she looks up and finds herself at the boat.

  She sidestrokes to the rope and grabs it with her right arm, but the left is sluggish and heavy-feeling, as though the pain were lead flowing thickly through her veins. She forces the arm up somehow, grasps the rope, and gets both feet on a knot. With agonizing slowness she pulls herself up until she's halfway in, her feet hanging over the side, the edge cutting into her stomach, and she just rolls and falls the short distance to the floor of the cabin.

  Her left arm is a wildfire of pain, radiating up into the shoulder and the side of her neck. And she's finding it difficult to draw a deep breath, as badly as she needs the air. Her lungs don't seem to be working right.

  In the searchlight's beam, Howard stands up and wades onto the rock, pushing through the sea wasps in his wet suit as though they're not there. Something glints in his hand. Rose has completed only two revolutions of the handle that pulls the anchor up when she hears his scream of rage.

  She manages one more crank on the handle and then has to stop, gasping for breath. She sees Howard sprint toward her across the rock and then arc out, his body straight and arrow-true, and he hits the water and begins to swim.

  He swims very fast.

  She manages one more turn of the handle, and then she spins and runs to the wheel. Turn ignition. She twists the key, and nothing happens. She wants to scream again, but she can't seem to draw enough air. Press ignition, she thinks, and there it is, the button. She pushes it hard enough to shove it through the panel, and the engine powers on. The boat begins to move but then jolts to a stop, and she is flung into the wheel, her forehead hitting the Plexiglas of the windscreen. The anchor has caught on something.

  She runs back and tries to turn the handle on the anchor crank, but she hasn't got the strength. She puts all her weight behind it, and yet she might as well be a breeze. It won't turn.

  She can hear Howard knifing through the water. He can't be far.

  She has no idea how to back the boat up, which would probably free the anchor. She knows how to do one thing, and she does it: She throttles to full power. The motor churns up a tremendous amount of water, but the boat doesn't move. There's a terrifying creaking from behind her, as if the anchor assembly is going to be ripped through the rear of the boat, and she has an instantaneous vision of it taking the motor with it, so she reduces speed and then powers up again, repeating the pattern several times, trying to rock the anchor free.

  She can't hear Howard swimming.

  She powers down again, and the anchor snaps the boat back, and something jolts forward on the cabin floor and strikes her bare foot. It's cold and it's hard.

  The boat tilts sideways, toward the rocks. The rope-why didn't she pull in the rope? — goes taut.

  From the water Howard says, "Ahhhh, Rosie."

  She looks down at her foot. The thing that slid into her is an automatic pistol, short and black. The one he fired at the rock. So the thing in his hand had to be-

  Howard's hand slaps the top edge of the deck. Then his left hand appears, holding the knife he'd flashed before. He heaves himself upward and puts both arms inside, hanging there by his underarms. He grins at her beneath the silly-looking bathing cap.

  "Baaad girl," he says. He begins to pull himself the rest of the way in, and Rose stoops down and picks up the gun and pulls the trigger.

  It jumps in her hand, so hard she thinks she'll drop it, and wood chips fly up from the edge of the deck. Howard freezes, his face all eyes, and he raises a hand to stop her.

  And she takes the gun in both hands this time and aims and very deliberately squeezes off two shots, and one of them hits him somewhere, because he's flung back, away from the boat, and an instant later she hears a splash. She runs to the edge of the deck, pointing the gun down, but she can't see him, so she yanks the rope out of the water with her free hand and goes back to the wheel. She powers down one more time and then gives the engine full throttle, and with a screech of wood being stretched the boat strains forward, and the anchor pulls free, and the vessel takes a leap that puts her on her back on the floor of the cabin, but she's up instantly, grabbing the wheel and cranking it all the way to the right, watching the rocks grow nearer and nearer and then begin to slide aside, and she leans there, all her weight on the wheel, sobbing and coughing, until the boat is pointed out into the empty sea. Only when she's been in motion for several minutes does she throttle down and go back to the stern to wind in the rest of the anchor chain.

  Once that's done, she has to sit. Her breaths feel like they can be measured in millimeters, as though her lungs are shrinking into nothing. A band of numbness squeezes her chest. She sits on the floor of the cabin, gasping, as the boat glides slowly forward. She needs both hands to stand, one pushing down on the cabin floor and one pulling on the edge of the bench. As soon as she's up and heaving for breath, she goes back to the wheel, and in the clamp that had held the rubberized flashlight, she sees the cell phone, open and blinking. She picks it up and listens. Nothing.

  Her voice an almost breathless whisper, she says, "Hello?"

  A man's voice says, "Did you get the bitch?"

  Rose's arm straightens automatically, as though she's just realized there's a tarantula crawling on her wrist, and the phone flies out of her hand and over the side of the boat. She's hanging on to the wheel, shuddering, when she hears it hit the water.

  Fighting for air, she turns and squints back at the rocks. The rain is still coming down, but she can see him standing on the biggest stone, the wet suit a black vertical against the pale of the rocks. She thinks, with a jolt of joy that literally makes her grind her teeth, Tide's coming in. And then the rain grows heavier, and it all disappears-the rocks, the man, everything.

  But she can still see the floating fire of the squid boats, and she steers directly toward it.

  Two days later she checks out of the hospital in Phuket Town, where she's been treated for the sea-wasp venom, and gets on a bus to Bangkok. Her breathing has improved, although it will be months before she draws a breath without thinking about it. She has all of Howard's money and the extra clothes she had packed in the suitcase she took aboard the boat. Except for the money, everything that belonged to Howard, including the wallet and the gun, are at the bottom of the Andaman. She had given one of the squid fishermen two hundred dollars U.S., plucked from Howard's wallet, to lead her back to Phuket. He'd taken one look at her arm and poured vinegar on it, and the sting had eased a bit, but her breathing was still labored. One of his crew had piloted her as she lay in the bottom of the cabin, gasping like a fish, across the dark sea to the lights of Phuket.

  Once in Bangkok, she checks into a cheap hotel miles from anywhere and sleeps for twenty hours. When she wakes, she takes the longest shower of her life and then goes down to the hotel's overpriced shop to buy tourist clothes, including a hat into which she can tuck her hair. There's no way to disguise her height, but at least she can change how she looks from a distance. A taxi delivers her to her bank, where she withdraws every penny she has deposited. Back in her room, she adds it to Howard's money and finds she has almost four thousand dollars, nearly 160,000 baht. That night, at 5:00 A.M., she is waiting across the street from her apartment when Fon and the other girls come home.

  Twelve hours later, around 5:00 in the evening, she gets off a bus in Fon's village in Isaan, where she will stay for nearly four years. She pays a small amount every month to Fon's parents and mails a little money to her own. She calls Fon every week to see whether Howard has come into the bar. She asks her mother in letters to tell her whether he ever comes to her village.

  He never does.

  After four years, Fon calls to say she's moved to the King's Castle. When Rose returns to Bangkok, she joins her friend on the stage of the biggest bar in Patpong. Three years later Poke Rafferty walks into the place.

  Chapter 20

  Ordinary Feels
Very Good

  It's been light for a couple of hours. The apartment is getting hot.

  At some point-he has no idea when-Rafferty apparently pushed the glass coffee table away from the couch so he could sit at Rose's feet and lean back against her knees; her words seemed to flow more freely when she couldn't see his face. So he's facing away from her now, in the long moments after she's finished talking, and across the room he sees the morning light picking out glittering splinters of glass in the carpet near the sliding door.

  Eight stories above the morning traffic, all he can hear is breathing.

  He twists around, getting a message from his lower back to slow down. He ignores it and rises to his knees, then turns to face Rose, accidentally bending the injured elbow and sucking breath through his teeth.

  She is sitting limply, sunk into the cushions, with her head tilted back and her eyes closed. He wants to put his arms around her, but it would be awkward with her sitting as she is, and he's also reluctant to break in on her, wherever she may be. Her face looks bleached out and tissue-thin, as though it's been scoured from the inside and one more pass will bare the muscles beneath the skin. Miaow lies on her right side, her knees jackknifed almost to her chest and her head on Rose's lap. Her eyes are wide open, looking directly at him. He reaches over and musses the yellowish chop of hair, and for the first time he can remember since he met her, she doesn't protest.

  Leaning against Rose on the other side, her eyes partly closed and her forearm thrown across Rose's lap so she's touching Miaow's shoulder, is Pim. She has the half-drowsy, half-abstracted air of someone reciting silently something she memorized long ago. Her eyes flick to him and then back down, and she rubs her cheek against Rose's shoulder.

  His cell phone rings across the room, on the kitchen counter.

  "That's twice," Rose says. She opens her eyes but keeps them on the ceiling.

  "And it can ring until the sun goes down." Rafferty looks up at his wife, but the moment their eyes meet, she drops her gaze, and the gesture ties a small knot in Rafferty's gut. He thinks, What else?

  But what he says is, "Coffee? Nescafe?"

  "I think I'll try to sleep for an hour or two," Rose says. "If that's okay with you, I mean."

  "If it's okay-" Rafferty begins.

  Miaow interrupts him. "That's all you want to say? 'Coffee?'"

  Rafferty rises, his back cracking like a bag full of knuckles. "I want to say a lot of things, but some of them are things I only want to say to Rose. And some of them are things I don't know how to say. Coffee will help."

  "Well," Rose says, disentangling herself from the two girls and putting her feet under her to get up, "you can say them to me later."

  Rafferty says, "I love you."

  "That," Rose says, standing and meeting his eyes for the first time, "that you can say now."

  Miaow says, "Me, too."

  Pim says, "You were so brave."

  "I was stupid," Rose says. She stretches, arms up, then presses her fists against her lower back, and bends backward. "But no stupider than you. Find something else to do."

  Pim pulls up her knees and rests her forehead on them. Then she wraps her arms around her shins, sealing herself into a ball.

  Miaow says, "I want a Coke."

  "That's all you have to say?" Rafferty mimics. " 'I want a Coke'?"

  "Phoo," Miaow says. She gets up with no effort, as though she'd been on the couch for only a few minutes rather than hours. Rafferty is watching with a certain amount of envy when he feels Rose's eyes on him. When he looks at her, one corner of her mouth is up in an almost-smile.

  "Remember?" she says. "Remember when everything worked like that?"

  "Everything still works," he says. "It just needs a little coaxing."

  "Well, since you're so limber," Rose says, "I'll have some Nescafe."

  Rafferty nods. "I'll make it."

  "I know," she says. "And, Pim? As long as Poke is up and proving he's flexible, is there anything you'd like?"

  Pim just stares up at her, mouth half open, looking as if the world exploded in her face.

  "Right." Rose sits back down and wraps her arms around the girl. "Nothing for Pim just now," she says.

  From the kitchen, safely out of sight, Miaow asks her question. "So you changed? From when you were in the village. When you were in the village, that's who you really were. The way you were in Bangkok, that wasn't." A pause. "Was it?"

  Rose, her arms entwined around Pim, says, "Of course not."

  "How? How did you change?"

  "Slowly," Rose says. "One bone at a time." She rubs Pim's shoulders with her right hand. "Like that thing you say in the play. About the king under the sea."

  " 'Of his bones are coral made-' " Miaow starts, coming into the room.

  "In Thai," Rose says.

  "Mmmm." Miaow squints up at a corner of the ceiling and changes languages. "His bones are made of coral now, and his eyes have turned to pearls. Everything's changing because of the sea, because he's underwater."

  "Like that," Rose says. "One bone at a time. Because I was underwater."

  Pim says, "Like I am now," and burrows her forehead into Rose's shoulder.

  "And after," Miaow says. "You changed again, into who you are now." It's more a challenge than a question. "Why? How?"

  "I met Poke," Rose says. "We found you." She glances at Rafferty and then back to Miaow. "You were the big one."

  Miaow returns her stepmother's gaze and then looks over to Rafferty. "Oh," she says, and she goes back into the kitchen. RAFFERTY'S BEEN EXPERIMENTING lately with what he likes to think of as domestic time management, trying to work out the best order for different chores, so one thing can process itself while he does another. It feels good to turn his attention to the coffee-making routine he's worked out: putting Rose's water on to boil while he grinds his coffee and pours it into the filter and adds a shot of cinnamon-a new touch-measuring and then pouring the cold water for his own coffee into the reservoir of the coffeemaker as Rose's water comes to a boil, then spooning out the powdered Nescafe, half a teaspoon extra, and filling Rose's cup with boiling water, stirring the Nescafe into something that resembles coffee's highly challenged third cousin, while the real thing drips from the pot into the carafe behind him.

  The whole procedure-the boiling, the grinding and stirring, the smells, the narrowly avoided collisions with Miaow as she barges around the tiny kitchen washing her hands, popping the top on her Coke, going on tiptoe to grab an orange-makes him aware how blessed he was yesterday, when all this was unremarkable, normal, everyday procedure, nothing that needed thought beyond boil the water first or grind the coffee first? Ordinary, he thinks. Ordinary feels very good.

  He carries Rose's cup in and puts it on the table. She gives him the sliver of a smile, her arms still around Pim. Miaow pulls a stool up to the counter and starts to peel her orange. Rafferty stops in the middle of the living room, flexes the sore elbow a couple of times, and says, "I just want to go on record. I love all this. I may not say so every day, but I do anyway."

  Miaow looks up from her orange. "That's a lot better than 'Coffee?'"

  "I even love you," Rafferty says. "It's like loving a cactus, but I do."

  Miaow gives the orange all her attention, but he can see the color bloom in her cheeks.

  He goes into the kitchen, feeling light-headed, and pours his own coffee into the mug he uses every day of his life. Every wonderful day of his life. Leaning against the cool of the refrigerator door, he inhales the aroma. Out in the living room, Rose murmurs something, probably to Pim, and the couch squeaks as someone gets up, and then the air conditioner cranks into life. Rose says to the world as a whole, "Time for a cigarette," and he hears the rasp of a match.

  "Maybe," Miaow says, her mouth full of orange, "maybe you ought to check the voice mail."

  "Me, me, me," Rafferty says happily. Despite the chain of horrors in Rose's story, he feels almost exhilarated. He knows what's wrong now; they ca
n begin to fix it. He downs about a third of his coffee, scalding the roof of his mouth, and then tops up the cup from the pot. "Fuel first," he says to Miaow, toasting her with the mug and slopping some on his fingers.

  She says, "Bean drink," with the special scorn she reserves for coffee.

  "The phone, the phone." Rafferty gulps and burns his mouth again, puts the cup on the counter, wipes his burned fingers on his pants, and speed-dials his voice mail. The first call is a hang-up. Then Arthit's voice comes on the line. He sounds like someone five thousand years old who hasn't slept since the turn of the century.

  "Your guy, Horner," he says. "He hasn't left the kingdom. He's in Thailand."

  PART III

  THE STORM

  Chapter 21

  I was wondering where I Wasn't

  Rafferty says, "Pack. Everything you'll need for three or four days." He's tugging at the hem of a new T-shirt, water dripping onto it from the tip of his chin, which he missed with the towel after splashing his face. His hair is damp from his having clawed through it with wet fingers.

  Rose says, "Where are we going?"

  "Later. For now, pack." To Pim he says, "This isn't the safest place in Bangkok. You should probably go."

  Pim looks at Rose and then Miaow. "Can I help?"

  Rose says, "I'll pack for me and tell you what to pack for Poke."

  "Don't forget the Glock," Rafferty says, and Miaow swivels to stare at him. "Both clips."

  "Where are you going?"

  "Arthit's not in his office, and no one is answering at home. So I'm going to his house."

  Miaow says, "With no one answering? Maybe he doesn't want to see anybody."

  "Of course he doesn't want to see anybody. I should have gone over days ago." HE HAS to knock three times.

  Standing there with the morning sun beating down on his shoulders, he has more time than he needs to see things he doesn't want to see: The tiny dead lawn, the stunted line of brown scrub where the flowers used to be. Three yellowing copies of the Bangkok Sun, lying any which way on the fried, brittle grass. When Arthit's wife, Noi, was alive, this little yard was as green and as immaculately tended as a Scottish golf course. Even after she got too sick to care for it herself, she would sit on the porch and direct Arthit as he planted and trimmed and raked and swept, grumbling happily the whole time.