Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  He reaches back and pulls the bedsheet on top of him and then wraps himself in it yet again, feeling like he could probably get rich designing a line of sheets with snaps or Velcro or something for men who are never allowed to wake up naturally. Miaow says, with her back to him, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Really,” Rafferty says. He’s up and working on his hemline.

  “That picture,” she says, and she grabs a breath, “you know, that picture?”

  “I know the picture,” he says, and Rose shoots him a glance that, while somewhat fond, quite clearly means shut up.

  “Well, I was thinking,” Miaow says again. “Ummm, it’s not hard to see that it’s me, right? And that it’s—it’s her, I mean, even though it was so long ago. Right?” She sniffles and swipes furiously at her nose.

  “I could see it,” Rose says.

  “Well, what I was thinking was—I mean, why don’t we use that to, you know, prove she was my mother and, and that way we could, ummm, we could make sure she gets a funeral, some kind of good funeral, with monks chanting and . . .”

  Rose says, “We’ll do it. We’ll all three go down there, and—”

  Rafferty says, “I can probably do it through Arthit.”

  “Well, then,” Miaow says, and she looks down at her feet.

  “If anyone had ever told me,” Rafferty says, “that my daughter was as smart as she is good-hearted and beautiful, I would probably have said it wasn’t possible.”

  Miaow, who is thermometer-red, says, “You’re so corny.”

  “What?” Campeau growls as he opens the door. Then he’s blinking rapidly at Rafferty. “Oh, it’s you.”

  “Getting a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

  Campeau sees what Poke is looking at and yanks his hand, which has been holding the door, out of sight. The thick gauze bandage around his wrist is professional and neatly done, but dirty enough to need changing.

  “We were worried about you.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Your landlady, Toots, the woman next door. Trix.” He watches Campeau’s eyes widen in something that might be panic, grabs a quick breath, and says, “Me.”

  “Woman next door—the Australian?”

  “She heard a lot of noise the night you left. It frightened her. She knocked on your door a bunch of times the next morning and then called the landlady. Landlady called me.”

  “Had a fight with myself,” Campeau says. “We were evenly matched.”

  “I know how that is.”

  “Do you,” Campeau says. It’s not a question. “Well, listen, I’ve got to—”

  “More or less.” He looks past Campeau at the woman who’s just come into view behind him, probably from the bathroom. She’s slender and white-haired, with symmetrical, delicate features and an unusually full mouth. She’s probably in her early seventies, and he’s seen her eyes before. “Good morning,” he says.

  Campeau turns as though he hadn’t been expecting anyone to be there. “Oh,” he says. Then, to Poke, he says, “This is, this is Malee.”

  “I thought it might be.” To her, he says, “It’s very nice to meet you.”

  “This is Poke,” Campeau says. He looks intensely uncomfortable.

  “You are friends,” Malee says, looking slightly surprised. Her English is almost unaccented.

  “Like this,” Poke says, holding up his index finger and middle finger, pressed together.

  “So, uhhh, listen,” Campeau says, “we should all go out sometime, me and Malee and you and, and, um, Rose.”

  “Just the four of us,” Rafferty says, wondering how much it’s going to cost him to sell Rose on it. “That would be great. Just great. Well, hey, I don’t want to butt in. Just needed to make sure you were okay.”

  “Yup, sure,” Campeau says, shifting from foot to foot. “You bet. Right as rain.”

  “Can’t tell you how happy I am about it.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Campeau says, “get out of here.” But he closes the door gently.

  He’s no sooner hit the sidewalk than his phone rings. It’s Fon. She says, “You can buy diaper?”

  AFTERWORD

  A long time ago when the world was young—in 2006, in fact—I began a book called A Nail Through the Heart with a scene in which the protagonist, an American travel writer, holds his adopted daughter’s hand as they follow his wife down a Bangkok sidewalk, shopping for groceries.

  I knew that it wasn’t the most electrifying opening in thriller history, but I wanted to say on the very first page that this was not a novel about Bangkok in which beautiful young Asian women threw themselves incessantly at uninteresting Caucasian men. My line of thought was something like wife + daughter + groceries = family.

  The word family did the trick. Since I don’t know how to plot in advance, I barely knew who these people were, but the moment I realized they were a family, I thought that it might be interesting to drop a normal—if intercultural and self-assembled—family, who are trying to preserve relationships along traditional lines, into the world capital of instant gratification. It felt to me like the family might serve as a friendly campfire in a world of cold neon.

  Most writers, I am convinced, make decisions on the fly because a notion feels right at the moment, and then they are forced to live with that decision for the rest of the book. Or, in this case, nine books. Miaow, who, on that very first page, was little more than a prop to make readers think, “Look, a family man,” became, for me, the heart of the series. That’s why I think it’s fitting to end it with the solution to the longest-running mystery of them all: why, all those years ago, Miaow was tied by a piece of twine to that bus bench and abandoned there. I couldn’t leave that unresolved.

  The claim Miaow staked on the series’ narrative line was a total, and not always welcome, surprise. I had never written a child before and I’ve never fathered any in real life, and there were times when the challenge of getting her onto the page kept me up at night. But somehow, she always knew what to do, even when I didn’t have a clue. Especially when I didn’t have a clue. I’m going to miss her. Hell, I’ll miss all of them. Well, okay, most of them. Even Bob Campeau.

  Writing is similar to theater in that characters—both major and minor—are like actors: some stick to the script; some rewrite their parts on the fly; some fight their way downstage center and demand more lines; and some just want to hide in the wings. When a series grows, those wings get crowded as characters from earlier books begin to congregate there, shuffling their feet and clearing their throats from time to time, hoping to be called back into action. Some made it and some didn’t. I had good relationships, if that doesn’t sound schizophrenic, with most of them, and the ones who refused to rise to the occasion were simply omitted from the following books or, in a pinch, got killed. Fortunately for writers, literary characters don’t have unions.

  I want to thank all the people who wrote me letters about the books over the life of the series, primarily the Vietnam vets who took the time to say I had come close to the way they felt about what they had been through, and also the families who were navigating the sometimes treacherous waters of intercultural adoption. I even met one of those adopted kids, and that was a kind of high spot in my writing life because she told me I got it mostly right. And thanks to the thousands of fans who wrote once or twice or three times to suggest music for me to write to or to tell me they liked the books but how could I have abandoned this character or that character, or to inform me that this or that fictional establishment wasn’t where I said it was (they would have found it exactly where I said it was if they’d been on a fictional street). And a specific kind of thanks to the hundred or so who wanted me to understand that I don’t know beans about guns.

  Very special thanks to the people who turned these daydreams into books at (chronologically) William Morrow/HarperCollin
s—especially the late, great Marjorie Braman—and then at the wonderful Soho Press, in the hands of the tactfully authoritative Juliet Grames, who has edited all of these for the past eight years and has made every one of them better than it was when she got it. People who haven’t yet had a book published often think that their relationship with a publisher will be a familial one, and are usually disappointed when the family turns out to be the House of Atreus. But I felt like these books have had two happy families, the one on the pages and the one at Soho that transformed these noodlings into something people might want to read. One of my favorite movie lines comes from the 1939 comic masterpiece Midnight, in which the central character, played by Claudette Colbert, who works in a Paris hat shop, is forced to wait on the unpleasant wife of the man she loves. She brings her hat after hat and then backs up and says, “This one does something for you, it . . . it gives you a chin.” The people at Soho have given these books a chin.

  And thanks to you for getting this far, and a very special, heartfelt thanks to my wife and muse, the one and only Munyin Choy. And three more. First, in this book, my Bangkok friend Norm Smith prevented me from making some very embarrassing mistakes about Lumphini, Patpong, and their environs. Second, Everett Kaser took the first five or six books and created The Poke Rafferty Book, a total reference resource on every character, every location, every theme. And third, thanks to Laren Bright, whose early reading of this manuscript, and many others, trimmed and tuned the writing from start to finish. Sometimes a writer is only as good as his friends.

  In closing, goodbye to this little world. It’s been a privilege, most of the time, for me to be here.