PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Sure,” Frank says. “The North Koreans. Anything that’s discounted right now, anything they can turn around—”

  Rafferty slices the air with the edge of his hand, and Frank stops in mid-word. “How do you know the North Koreans?”

  “My shop, so to speak,” Frank says, as though it were obvious. “And shops like my shop. They’re among the very few people in the world who’ll do business with the North Koreans.”

  Rafferty reaches out, grabs a handful of his father’s peanuts, and gets settled. He smiles at Ming Li, who gives him a puzzled smile in return. “Do tell,” he says.

  !27

  The Snoop

  ubies, he thinks. Even the word has a shimmer around it. Just behind

  the shimmer, he can see something, something that looks a little bit like daylight. He has no idea how to get to it yet. But he does know what he has to do: He has to leave it alone for a while, close the door on it, and let it grow unobserved. He either will or won’t have it—whatever it is—when he needs it.

  Half an hour after Frank opened the box that contains the rest of Chu’s life, Ming Li and Leung led Rafferty out into the rain and through a dizzyingly complicated route that eventually took them, unobserved as far as any of them could tell, to Sukhumvit. If there was a single back alley that they missed, Rafferty doesn’t know about it.

  It is now almost three o’clock. Since leaving the Home Away from Home, Rafferty has made the stop he planned the previous day and has broken at least three laws in at least two countries. The tote bag he filled at the apartment is marginally lighter. He has reached a new and previously unimaginable level of exhaustion and is considering calling Arthit to ask for help getting to a bed when his phone rings. He pulls it out, checks the caller ID, and opens it.

  “Time to go snoop on your Agent Elson,” Arthit says. “He’s just gone to eat something. The Erawan Hotel, and make it quick.”

  “On the way.” Rafferty hails a cab, thinking, It’s a sign. The rain stopped.

  “THE ROOMS ON either side?” Arthit demands.

  The assistant manager who has been delegated to let them in says, “What about them?”

  “Both occupied?”

  “Room 134 is,” the assistant manager says. A little finger brushes his lower lip. He’s tall, slender, and too handsome for his own spiritual good, and he knows it. He has a habit of touching his face as though he wants to make sure it’s still there. The fingers of his other hand are curled elegantly around a slender cell phone, which he checks between trips to his face.

  The phone makes Rafferty nervous.

  Arthit wiggles his fingers for attention. “And 138? On the other side?”

  The assistant manager massages the tip of his chin with a fingernail that’s been coated in clear polish. Both the finger and the chin make Rafferty want to hit him, or maybe he’s just tired. “It’s empty.”

  “Adjoining door?” Arthit asks.

  “Yes, of course. So we can open it into a suite.”

  “We’ll take the suite,” Arthit says. “Unlock the door to 138. Then let us into 136 through the adjoining door.”

  If he touches his face again, Rafferty thinks, I’ll belt him. Now, though, the man’s fingers stop at the knot in his tie, which he adjusts. He takes his time, weighing the demand. He’s been told to open one room, not two. On the other hand, Arthit has his cop face on. “Fine,” he says at last. He floats down the hall to 138 and opens the door, politely stepping aside.

  “You first,” Arthit says. “You’ve got another door to open for us.”

  Rafferty says, “And we wouldn’t want to get between you and the mirror.” Arthit looks down at his shoes.

  Inside, the man unlocks the connecting door to 136 and waits.

  “You can go,” Arthit says. “We’ll let you know when we’re done.”

  A reluctant nod, and the man leaves. Rafferty watches to make sure his shoes actually touch the carpet. Arthit goes into Elson’s room.

  “What was all that with the phone?” Rafferty asks, following Arthit.

  “Probably waiting for a call from MTV,” Arthit says. “Or the Miss Universe Pageant.”

  Elson’s room is immaculate and dim, the curtains drawn against the sun. Rafferty opens them a few inches. The room still seems clean. “What are we searching for?”

  “An edge,” Arthit says. “Doesn’t have to be a sharp one.” He goes to the laptop on the desk and powers it on. “You check the suitcase.”

  The suitcase is open, centered on the bed nearest the window. Elson has not bothered to unpack, and Rafferty immediately sees why.

  “Jesus,” he says to Arthit, “this guy safety-pins his socks together.” He pulls out a pair. “What do you think, he’s afraid they’ll have a fight and separate or something?” There are six pairs of socks, each pair pinned, identical black calf huggers so new that the writing hasn’t been laundered off the bottom. Below the socks are two narrow black ties, folded precisely into thirds. Then several sheets of dry-cleaning film, each enclosing an immaculate white shirt.

  “Shit,” Arthit says from the desk. “He’s got a password program.”

  “Figures.” Rafferty lifts the shirts to check beneath them. “This goes beyond neat. This is diseased.” He runs his hands over the lining of the suitcase, not expecting anything fancy: Elson will have been walked through Thai customs as though he were radioactive. The Secret Service, he’s pretty sure, doesn’t get searched much. At the bottom of the suitcase is an envelope and a pair of shoes, black lace-ups similar to the ones the agent wore the night he barged into Rafferty’s apartment. Rafferty removes the envelope and the shoes. He puts the envelope aside and experimentally inserts his fingers into a shoe. He hits something hard and cold and oddly slick. He slides it out, makes a face, and then looks in the other shoe.

  “What do you think?” he says to Arthit. “An edge?”

  Arthit closes the laptop and comes to take a look. Rafferty is holding a deck of condoms, at least twenty of them, and an economy-size tube of lube.

  “If he went to the trouble of hiding them,” Arthit says, “it’s an edge. What’s in the envelope?”

  The envelope isn’t sealed. The flap has just been tucked, very neatly, into the opening. Rafferty worries it open, intentionally wrinkling it a little. “Credit-card receipts,” he says. “Mr. Organized, tracking his expenses.” He picks one at random and opens it. “The Lilac,” he says. “On the back he’s written ‘Dinner with Thai police liaisons.’”

  “Read me another,” Arthit says. He looks like he’s on the verge of a grin.

  “Wattana Enterprises,” Rafferty reads. “The note is ‘Souvenirs.’”

  “Come on, Poke,” Arthit says. “I know you haven’t slept, but still. The Lilac. Wattana.”

  “Wattana,” Rafferty says. “Isn’t he that guy who ran for the senate a year back? The . . . the— Oh, good Lord, I must be tired. The massage-parlor king.”

  “And the Lilac,” Arthit says, “is a no-hands restaurant. You know the drill: You’re seated between two girls and you’re not allowed to use your hands to eat anything while they feed you, but you can do anything else with your hands that might occur to you.”

  “They’re on his government-issued credit card,” Rafferty says.

  Arthit says, “There’s your edge.”

  Rafferty puts everything back into the suitcase except the condoms, the credit-card receipts, and the lube, then goes to the desk. He takes a hotel pen and writes a single word, all caps in large print, on a sheet of stationery, then drops it dead center on top of the stuff in the suitcase. He places the condoms on one side, the lube on the other, and the envelope beneath, so they frame the word.

  The word is “HI!”

  !28

  As Though He’s Been Invited

  bout the same time Rafferty is searching Elson’s suitcase, Arthit’s wife, Noi, is awakened, as she is so often these days, by the pain of her nerves burning away as multiple

&n
bsp; sclerosis licks at the sheathing tissue that covers them. She has come to think of the disease as a fire in her body, sometimes banked and sometimes burning out of control, whipped up by something she does not understand. When the disease is raging, especially late at night, it seems there is a third person in the room with her and Arthit, someone who knows how to fan the flames just by staring at her. She feels his emotionless, clinical gaze through the darkness at times when Arthit is sleeping beside her, and on those nights she chews on the corner of her pillowcase to keep from moaning. Noi does not want Arthit to know how fierce the pain has become.

  The room is full of light. Of course, it is afternoon. Arthit is off with Poke, making the world—as he likes to say—a more boring place. Her guests will probably be asleep, Rose on the couch and Miaow in the spare bedroom, the one she and Arthit thought would be the nursery until the disease chose their door from all the doors on the block and

  knocked.

  There is a child in the house, she thinks.

  She stretches experimentally, feeling the coals burning in her elbows and fingers—not too bad, a thin layer of ash on them—and explores the weakness in her legs. She has learned in the past few months to test her legs one at a time while she is still in bed, putting one foot atop the other and pushing down, before she tries to stand. On the days when she knows she will be too unsteady to stay upright, she pretends to sleep until Arthit has left the house and then reaches under the mattress on her side of the bed for the aluminum cane he has never seen.

  She hopes he has never seen it.

  Lately it seems to her that they are playing two different games with similar rules. Noi does not tell Arthit about the progress of the disease because she does not want to burden him. Arthit pretends not to see it because he does not want to injure her pride. So the two of them, each with the other in mind, ignore the thing that has come to occupy the central place in their lives, filling that place with silence.

  The place they thought a child would fill.

  As she pushes back the covers, she realizes she awoke earlier, dragged up from sleep briefly and then allowed to sink again. It seems to her that the figure who fans the fire was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her. The image creates a cold ball of dread in her belly.

  Her legs tremble beneath her, but hold, as she bends over the foot of the bed to pick up the robe Arthit bought her for no reason, not even her birthday. She hates the color, a sort of faded, pickled, unripe-banana green, but loves the idea of Arthit shopping for her. She can see those thick fingers picking up one flimsy garment after another as he stands stiff and conspicuously uncomfortable in his uniform in some department store, surrounded by women but unwilling to flee until he finds the one he likes, the one that makes her look as yellow as a wax candle. She slides her arms into the sleeves, pausing as she realizes she is standing exactly where the figure stood the first time she opened her eyes. The dread in her belly solidifies into a gelatinous mass.

  Pushing it aside with an enormous effort, Noi limps into the hall. No cane today, not in front of her guests. The thought of the child, Miaow, carries her along.

  The door to the spare room is ajar. Noi pushes it open a few inches to find Rose sitting on the bed looking at her, with Miaow asleep at her side, the child’s head pillowed on Rose’s arm. Even in sleep Miaow looks as if she’s in motion; her knees are drawn up like someone doing a cannonball into a swimming pool, and her mouth is half open. Rose smiles and lifts a finger to her lips, then eases her arm out from beneath Miaow. Miaow shifts and emits a syllable of complaint. Rose holds perfectly still until the child seems to be asleep again.

  The kitchen is as warm as a hive, rich with the honey-colored afternoon light that slants through the windows and fragrant from the small pots of basil and rosemary Noi grows on the sill. Rose’s hair is a glorious tangle that Noi briefly envies and then forgets, concentrating on moving smoothly. “Coffee or tea?”

  Rose gives her a sleepy smile. “Do you have Nescafé?”

  “Of course.” Noi slides to the cabinet above the counter, lifting her feet as little as possible—it is the moment when they come back into contact with the floor that gives her the most trouble. She tries to make it look like a preference, perhaps a joke, but she can feel Rose’s eyes on her.

  “Poke hates Nescafé,” Rose says. “It’s enough to drive me away.”

  “Arthit drinks it by the quart. Hot, cold, lukewarm. He sprinkles it on ice cream.” She unscrews the lid of the jar, smaller and lighter than the ones she used to buy, more expensive but easier to handle. “Arthit’s not happy unless he’s nervous.”

  “Poke truly loves Arthit,” Rose says, stretching long arms. “It’s a good thing I’m not jealous. Or very jealous anyway.”

  “Life blesses you when you least expect it.” Noi puts the kettle on the burner and listens for the little poof as it ignites; she has a deep-seated dread of the kitchen filling with gas. “Arthit was certain he was through making friends. One thing I don’t understand is why it gets more difficult to make friends as you get older. Remember how many friends you used to have?”

  “Thousands,” Rose says. “You said hi to somebody and they were glued to you. And it was impossible to be nosy then. Everybody wanted you to know everything. Nobody had a subconscious. And then one day everybody turned into a box of secrets.”

  “It’s not that they got worse,” Noi says. She leans against the stove, feeling the comfortable warmth at her back. “Good people get better, I think, and bad people were already bad. It’s just that people close themselves up. I think of young people as standing like this”—she opens her arms—“and older people like this”—she crosses her arms protectively across her chest.

  “Or this,” Rose says, shielding her privates. Noi laughs.

  “It’s one reason I’m grateful for this illness,” Noi says. “It brought Poke and Arthit together.” Arthit had originally requested an interview with Rafferty when he learned Poke was writing the book that eventually became Looking for Trouble in Thailand. He went out and bought one of the earlier books in the series, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines, to satisfy himself that the new book wouldn’t fall into the genre of self-improvement for pedophiles, and the two of them had met for the first time over an unreasonable number of Singha beers. During the course of their mutual decline into inebriation, Arthit had told Poke about Noi’s disease, then in its earliest stages, and Rafferty had put him into contact with a doctor in Japan who was working on a promising new treatment. The treatment hadn’t worked, but the friendship had.

  “He talked about Arthit for days,” Rose says. He had talked about Noi, too, but Rose does not say this. Poke had pitied Noi then, something that became unthinkable to Rose after the two women met. Noi is too strong to pity.

  Noi feels a draft on the back of her neck, something that happens with increasing frequency these days. Some trick of the nerves, yet another way they’ve found to call attention to themselves, the pigs. She turns back to the kettle, but the water is not boiling yet.

  “You said one of the things you were grateful for,” Rose says. “What are the others?”

  “It gave me notice,” Noi says, facing her again. “If it had been faster, I never would have been able to have told Arthit, to have shown Arthit, the way I feel about him. It would have been terrible to be . . . I don’t know, snatched away without the time I’ve been given to make things right.”

  “You’re tough,” Rose observes.

  “I’ve had practice.” She starts to maneuver herself back around to the stove and stops, staring over at Rose. “What’s that?”

  “What?” Rose looks down at herself, and then back up at Noi. “Oh,” she says, putting her hands below the table.

  “Ho, ho,” Noi says. “Is this something a friend would tell a friend about?”

  Rose brings her hands back up, turning the ring self-consciously. It still feels thick on her finger. “There hasn’t been time. It only
happened two nights ago.”

  “And you said . . . ?”

  “Oh, well. This time I didn’t have the heart to say no. He was terrified. He’d had it in his pocket for hours, patting it every fifteen seconds like he was hoping it had disappeared. I had to take pity on him. As Miaow says, he tries so hard.”

  “They don’t deserve us,” Noi says. “Except when they do.”

  “The first time I knew he was going to ask, I did everything I could to chase him away, short of shooting him,” Rose says. “I was awful. I talked for hours. I trotted out my mother and my father, their money problems, my infinite number of younger sisters, my past, other men— anything I could think of to scare him off. It’s no wonder he looked so frightened.”

  “Has it changed the way you feel?”

  Without thinking about it, Rose runs her fingers over the three stones. “The ring is us,” she says. “It’s a picture of us, Poke’s way of trying to make the three of us permanent. It makes me feel—I guess the word is ‘fierce.’ It makes me believe I’d do anything to protect him and Miaow.” She does not add what she thinks, which is, The way you protect Arthit.

  “We all know that children need protection,” Noi says, “but we’re supposed to keep it a secret that men do.” She feels the draft again and rubs her neck. “Well,” she says, “come here.”

  Noi opens her arms, and Rose gets up and embraces her. Noi’s nose barely comes to her breastbone, but the heat flows from her in waves, and Rose’s breath catches, and she suddenly realizes she is crying.

  “It’s not so terrible,” Noi says, patting her. And then she starts to laugh, and the laugh turns into a sob, and the two women stand there hugging each other and weeping until Noi says, “This is silly,” and dries her eyes on the lapel of the awful green robe. “What a pair,” she says, turning back to the stove. “Do you like it strong?”

  “Strong enough to dissolve the cup,” Rose says. “Has Poke said anything to Arthit?”

  “If Arthit knows, he hasn’t said a word to me. I’ve barely seen him since this morning,” Noi adds, pouring.