A Nail Through the Heart (19 page)

Rose draws a long breath and blows it out, turning slowly to the glass doors. She could be counting the lights in the windows. “A while ago, you said ‘I can try,’” she says. She looks back to him. “I can try, too.”

“I promise to keep my eyes open. I promise to listen. I promise not to think I can make everything right by fixing your intake valve or something. But I don’t promise not to try to make things right. That’s part of the way I love you.”

Rose brings both hands to her mouth. The gesture stops him.

“I haven’t said I love you,” Rose says. “I should have said that first. I do love you. I love you enough to try to do this right or not do it at all.”

“We
can
try,” Rafferty says. “We can try together.” For the first time, he feels confident enough to stand.

“There’s one more thing,” Rose says. “And, Poke? I don’t expect us to solve all these things tonight. But I want it all said. I don’t want to leave anything under—what is it you say?—under the couch.”

“Under the rug.” He is aching to hold her.

“All right, under the rug.” She brings her hands together in front of her, loosely folded. “I’m someone who is changing her life. I’m the person, the only person, who takes care of my family. I’m someone who has been used and lied to, and lied to again, for years. I’ve met the experts.”

“I know.”

She holds up both hands. “Right now, Poke, I’m balanced on top of a high wall. If I walk exactly right, I’ll be fine. If I take a wrong step, I’ll fall. What happens to me is not important, but what happens to my family if I fall is very important. But, Poke? You’re balanced on top of a wall, too. I don’t want to be…to be what you trip over.”

“I’ll walk carefully. And I’ll look out for you, too.”

“Then listen to me now. I won’t talk about this again.” Her eyes close slowly, and when she reopens them, she is looking at a spot on the floor, midway between them. “I danced on that stage a long time. There were a lot of men, hundreds of men. To them I was Number 57.” She brings her eyes up. “Your wife. Number 57.”

“My wife. Rose.”

“We’ll meet them,” she says. “They’re everywhere in Bangkok.” She extends a hand, mimicking an introduction. “‘This is my wife, Number 57.’” She widens her eyes in mock surprise. “‘Oh, I see. You’ve already met.’ It’ll be you and Fon all over again, except that the girl will be me. Your wife.”

“Do you honestly think I’d feel that way?”

“Or suppose Number 58 comes along.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“No,” she says, pulling her hair back again. “It probably won’t. You’re an honorable man.”

“Then is that it?”

She sighs. “Poor baby,” she says. “That’s it. But promise me you’ll think about it, Poke. About all of it.”

“Fine, but I’m going to ask you to think about something, too.”

“What?”

“Miaow.”

She puts long fingers to her eyes and rubs them gently. Without
looking at him, she says, “I think about Miaow all the time. Almost as much as I think about you.”

“I know you do.”

She gives him the smile that starts with her eyes, slowly finds its way to the corners of her mouth, and always makes his legs wobble. “You know what I think about, do you? Then what am I thinking right now?”

He grins back at her. “You’re thinking about kissing me.”

“You
are
paying attention. How about it?”

“A kiss is a viable option,” he says in English. He takes a step toward her.

The telephone rings.

“Wait a minute,” Rafferty says to the phone without picking it up. He wraps his arms around her, feels the long, strong back, the deeply rounded gully of her spine. She tilts her head, and their lips meet. The tip of her tongue traces the shape of his lips and then darts into his mouth. He tastes her sweetness and breathes in the faint fragrance of her skin. Her cheeks are dusted with baby powder.

She steps back, her face flushed. “You’d better get that now, or you won’t get it at all.”

Rafferty picks up the phone. In the background he hears a shrieking that sounds like a thousand rusty hinges, like a convention of crows, like nothing human.

“You must come,” says Pak. “You must come
this minute.
”

H
e can hear her screams even while he is talking with the guard at the gate. Pak meets him halfway up the drive, dripping sweat, with panic widening his eyes. They head toward the house at a run.

“What is it?”

“She will tell you.” Pak is out of breath. He has to fight to get the words out. The back of his jacket is soaked with perspiration.

The front door stands open, light pouring out into the night. Pak leads him to the right, toward the screams. “You must be patient with her,” he says over his shoulder. “Madame is in an excitable state.”

“Thanks for the bulletin.”

They enter the small room where he first met Madame Wing. She is crumpled in her wheelchair with her knees drawn up to her shoulders, looking as angular and insubstantial as a swatted spider. A blanket covers the lower half of her body. Two enormous male servants are in the room, their heads bowed, as Madame Wing pours her fury on them, a shrill stream high enough to make dogs howl. When Raf
ferty comes in, she breaks off and gives him a glare that is intended to nail him to the wall.

“You,”
she spits. “What have you been
doing
? What earthly good are you? Your mother should have aborted you.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” Rafferty says. “And you?”

“Idiot.
You took my money and you have done nothing. I placed my faith in you—”

“And I identified the man who robbed you in less than twenty-four hours. By the way, his name is Chouk Ran.”

“A lot of good that does. A
name.
” She almost chokes on the word. “What use is a fucking
name
? I need
that man’s skin.
”

The hell with it,
Rafferty thinks.
Take the fifteen K and walk.

She strikes at the arms of her wheelchair with the gnarled hands as though she could beat the truth out of it. “He made a
demand,
” she snarls. “He had the effrontery to make a
demand.
If you had done your job—”

“When did the demand come?”

She breaks off, her mouth open and quivering. She swallows loudly enough to be heard across the room. “Early this morning.”

“Excuse me? Did you say early this
morning
?”

“Are you deaf as well as useless?”

“No, I’m just having a little trouble believing my ears. I thought you said it came early this morning—”

“That
is
what I said—”

“—and, see, that doesn’t make sense, because I know you would have called me. Since I’m working on this for you, remember? It would have been stupid not to call.”

Pak inhales sharply behind him.

Madame Wing stares at him with something like disbelief. Finally she says, in a tone so cold he can almost see her breath cloud, “You were not needed.”

“Apparently I was. Or am I missing something? He made a demand, and you met it, and he kept what he stole from you. Something along those lines?”

“Mr. Rafferty—” Pak begins, but Madame Wing silences him with a look.

“Yes,” she says. She is watching him, the dark eyes flat and still as a snake’s.

“What did he want?”

The steel returns to her voice. “Ten million baht.”

“And you sent it to him. Who took it?”

Her mouth twists as though she would spit at his feet. “A maid,” she says.

“Bring her.”

“That is not necessary.”

Rafferty is suddenly so angry his throat is almost blocked. “How about this? How about bring her or I leave?”

She blinks as though she has received a blow to the face. “Leave?”

“Go home. Send your fucking money back and let you deal with this yourself.”

For a moment Rafferty thinks Madame Wing will fly out of her wheelchair and straight at him, but instead she settles back and, in a voice like a grinding knife, says to Pak, “Get her.”

“Did he send you anything?” Rafferty asks when Pak is gone.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “He sent me something.” She reaches beneath the blanket on her lap and withdraws an envelope. She holds it out, and he crosses the room and takes it from her. Her hand is shaking for the first time. In the envelope are three sheets of cardboard, very much like the ones that came in the shirts he bought for Superman.

“And I’m correct in assuming that this was not what he stole.”

“Do not bait me, Mr. Rafferty. Better people than you have tried.”

“I’m not afraid of you. Whoever you are, you’re not used to people who hit back.”

She coils herself deeper in the chair, but before she can reply, she suddenly registers that the other two servants are still in the room. “Out,” she snaps. They practically collide in their eagerness to leave.

“Did Chouk pick up the money himself?” Rafferty asks before she can launch into whatever she was going to say.

She is looking at him as though she is trying to guess his weight. “It would seem so.”

“How did he do it?”

Grudgingly at first and then with mounting fury, she tells him about the taxis and the cell phone.

“It sounds like he’s alone,” Rafferty says, working it through. “There’s nothing he would have needed a partner for. He gets into a taxi and pays it to wait on the boulevard for two or three hours before the maid is supposed to come out. He’s looking for a setup. He writes down the plate numbers of the cars that seem to be idling around, if any are. Then, when the maid gets into her taxi, he follows for an hour or so to make sure there’s no one behind him, and then he calls her and tells her where to stop.”

“What could you have done about it?”

He studies the bas-relief for a moment, not really seeing it. “Well, off the top of my head, I would have been in a private car with a driver, a few blocks away. The maid would have had two cell phones, one I could call on and the one he gave her, so he would never get a busy signal. She would have called me the moment she was in the cab, so I could hit the street just as she pulled away. I would have changed cars once or twice so I wouldn’t be spotted, and called her to find out where they were so I could direct my driver. I suppose there’s a small chance that they might have made the exchange when I wasn’t around, but not much of one.”

After a moment she says in a withering tone, “Pak did not think of this.”

“Yeah,” Rafferty says, “and neither did you.”

He hears people enter the room behind him and turns to see Pak, trailed by a plump maid with a blunt-chopped schoolgirl’s haircut, no more than eighteen or nineteen years old. She wears a black skirt and white blouse, and she is hanging her head. It is not until she lifts her chin that he sees the quivering jaw and, above it, the bandages.

One eye is completely swathed in white adhesive, with the puffy
edges of a cotton pad peeping out from beneath it. The bandages continue down both cheeks, all the way to her jawline. One slants white across her nose. Above the bandages on the left side of her face are two long, red gouges, scored deep into the defenseless tissue and stained with iodine. Her eyes skitter toward him for an instant and then drop to the floor.

Rafferty turns to Madame Wing, feeling the tightness come back to his neck and shoulders. “Did you do this?”

Madame Wing’s chin comes up, and the corners of her mouth pull down. “And if I did?”

“Then you’re an appalling old bitch.” Pak lays a hand on his shoulder, and Rafferty pivots quickly and knocks it off. “Don’t touch me again unless you want a lot of stuff to get broken.” To Madame Wing he says, “Who the fuck do you think you are, the empress dowager?”

“Mr. Rafferty,”
Pak says.

“I’m going to work this out,” he says, his voice ragged with anger, “but not because of you. Because a Thai safecracker named Tam got killed by your Mr. Chouk, and he had a very sweet wife whose heart was broken by it. And thanks for telling me about the dead man. You can pay me or not, I don’t give a shit. I never want to lay eyes on you again.” He wheels around and says to Pak, “Get out of my way.”

“Stop, Mr. Rafferty,” Madame Wing says. “Please stop.”

“I don’t brake for assholes.”

“You want to solve this, don’t you? For whoever it was. Then you have to see what else he sent me.”

He turns back to her in spite of himself. “What?”

“You’ll be interested,” she says acidly. “Follow me.”

She wheels herself past Pak, past Rafferty, and through the door, the wheelchair making its trapped-animal squeal. Rafferty tracks her down a long hallway into a spacious, formal room. On the floor of the room are two large, open suitcases. At first Rafferty thinks they are full of rags. Then he looks more closely and inhales so sharply he starts to cough.

“Ten million baht,” Madame Wing says. “Shredded.”

He hears a rustle of paper behind him, but he can’t stop looking at the shredded money, ten million baht cut into narrow, worthless strips. “He also sent this,” Madame Wing says.

He tears his eyes away from the suitcase to see her holding out a sheet of cheap notebook paper. It is written in a language he cannot read, just a few short words, a single line of flowing script.

“What does it say?”

She looks up at him with those luminous nocturnal eyes. “It says ‘I want the deed to your house.’”

He looks back at the spirals of paper, worthless now. Trying to measure the amount of hate in the gesture. Against all his instincts, he realizes, he wants to know more about that hate.

He says, “Give me the deed.”

F
or the second day in a row, Rafferty is up at six. After months of trying to get up early and failing, he has found the remedy: Sleep on a lumpy couch in the apartment’s brightest room. He is at the kitchen counter, working on his second cup of coffee, when Miaow comes briskly into the living room. Her school clothes are primly immaculate, seams plumb straight, her face shining with the effect of the cold water she uses to wake herself up. Her hair is so precisely in place it looks like she arranged it one strand at a time. Rafferty’s joints grow weak at the sight of her.

She is preoccupied, all business, and he has a sudden vision of what she will look like as an adult: She will look like a corporate vice president. She stops at the couch, notices the blanket Rafferty dropped when he got up, and goes through a small pantomime of exasperation. She does everything but shake her head. With an expression of sorely tried patience, she picks up the blanket and refolds it into sharp-cornered quarters. When she has placed it neatly at the head
of the couch, she turns and sees him for the first time. Her eyebrows chase each other toward her hairline.

“Good morning, Miaow.”

She looks at him, then at the clock on his desk. “Am I late for school?”

“No. I’m early. I want to talk to you about something.”

She purses her mouth, bringing Mrs. Pongsiri to mind, and angles her head slightly in the direction of her room, the direction of Superman. “A problem?”

“Not about him,” Rafferty says. “And not a problem, really. A good thing.”

He watches her cross the room and climb up onto the chair beside him. He suddenly realizes he has no idea what her morning routine might be. A pang of guilt pierces him: What kind of father
is
he? “Do you want some milk or something? Cereal? Eggs?”

“An orange,” she says. “And a Coke.”

“Coke? At this hour? And an orange?”

“That’s what I eat,” she says patiently. “Every morning.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” his mother says in his voice.

“Is that why you’re just drinking coffee?” She makes a grimace. “Coffee.” She says it the way she might say “mucus.”
“Bean drink.
Hot bean drink. And you give
me
a hard time.”

“I’m a grown-up. I don’t need breakfast.”

“And you hate it,” Miaow says.

“There’s that,” he acknowledges.

“I hate it, too. This is my breakfast. A Coke and an orange. Unless we have grapes.”

“I see.” He has run out of things to say, so he gets up and grabs an orange and a can of warm Coke. “It’s a pretty awful breakfast,” he says, pouring the Coke.

“I know,” she says, closing the subject.

“Ice?” The question is ridiculous and he knows it.

She doesn’t even look up. “Oh,
please.
” She manages to pack into
the words a remarkable amount of world-weariness for someone who’s only eight.

“I have to say
something,
Miaow. It’s sort of my job.”

“I’m used to being alone in the morning,” she says with a tinge of grumpiness.

“Me, too.” He sits across the counter from her on the living-room side, so he can see her face. The two grumps share a companionable silence as she peels her orange. Its sharp fragrance invades his nostrils. He can hear the Coke fizzing in the glass. He feels inexplicably happy. How could he have missed this for so many mornings?

“What are we supposed to be talking about?” she says with her mouth full.

“I want you to stay with me,” he says.

She looks up at him, chewing. “I
am
staying with you.”

“No. I mean forever. Permanently.” After what he went through with Rose, he has no idea how Miaow will react. He can feel his heart bumping its way around inside his chest as though it’s gotten lost.

She looks quickly away, her face closed. For a long moment, she works on chewing her orange. Then she says, “Okay.”

Rafferty makes a firm decision that he will not burst into tears. He concentrates on the orange, half peeled on the table, on how the light strikes the jeweled sections and the fine white threads, and then he says, “Up until now we’ve been kind of breaking the law. I want to adopt you. Officially. Do you know what that means?”

She still has not looked at him. “Sure,” she says. “It means you’re really my…um, my father. Instead of just pretend.”

“That’s right.” He has difficulty getting the words out, and she darts him a glance at the sound of his voice, then looks away again. He clears his throat and says, “That’s what I want.”

“Oh,” she says to the refrigerator. Then she says, “Me, too.”

Oranges smell like happiness,
Rafferty thinks. “We have to go talk to a man today. He’s a nice man named Hank Morrison.”

“Khun Hank,” she says. “All the kids know him.”

“Do they like him?”

“He helps.” Her enthusiasm is somewhat reserved.

“Well, we have to go talk to him today, after school. He’s going to ask us questions, about how we live here and about what happened to you before you came here.”

Her shoulders rise protectively. “What kind of questions?”

“About everything,” he says.

She looks him full in the face and then, slowly, lowers her eyes until she is gazing at the surface of the counter. With a coiled index finger, she strikes the half orange, sending it spinning.

Rafferty waits until the orange wobbles to a stop. “He’ll ask you some questions I’ve never asked you. I want you to promise me you’ll tell him the truth.”

“He doesn’t have to know everything,” she says. “Nobody has to know everything.”

“He has to know everything.”

Her face sets. “No.” She strips a thread from the orange and rolls it into a tight ball between thumb and forefinger, then flicks it—hard—across the room at the refrigerator. Her spine is rigid.

“It’s to help us. He has to ask the questions, or the police won’t let me adopt you.”

She pushes her chair back stiffly, ignoring the half-eaten orange. “I’m going to be late for school.”

“So you’ll be late. What’re they going to do, chop you up and fry you?” He puts a hand flat on the counter between them. “Listen, Miaow, I can make you a promise. I promise he won’t tell me what you talk about if you don’t want him to. But you have to talk to him.”

She looks down at her lap, evaluating the weight of the promise. “We’ll see,” she says, and Rafferty hears his own equivocation, refined over a lifetime, coming back at him, from a child he has known only a few months. As he watches her shoulder her book pack and close the door behind her, he wonders what other dubious gifts he may have passed on.

ULRICH’S DRAPES ARE
open. Someone has been here. Rafferty pauses at the door, holding it open, listening. It is not difficult for him to imagine someone else standing absolutely still in one of the rooms, listening as well. After a minute or so, he figures the hell with it and goes in. He picks up one of the small stone apsarases, hefts it like a club, grabs the gun with his free hand, and does a quick search. He is alone.

The place is hot again. As little as he wants to touch them, he has come to look for manufacturers’ marks on the whips and restraints in the bottom drawer of the cabinet; they might tell him where they were bought. He is dreading the moment he has to pick them up. The instant he enters the office, he stops as suddenly as he would if he had walked into a glass door.

Uncle Claus’s CD-ROMs are back.

Not all of them, he sees, as he nears the desk. There are three empty slots in the storage tower. The others have been returned, presumably by whoever removed them in the first place, which—according to the woman next door—had been Doughnut. Considering all the trouble she took to gain access to Claus Ulrich’s life in the first place and the care with which she erased her presence when she left, it must have been important to her to return to take these things away, and equally important to bring them back.

He sits down at the desk and turns on the computer. While he waits for it to go through its internal checklist, he opens the first of the CD cases, which says WINDOWS 98.

The disk inside is home-burned from a blank available everywhere in Bangkok, ten disks for two to ten bucks, depending on the gullibility of the buyer. Written neatly near the center, in black permanent marker, is the notation
“AT Series 400–499.”

AT Series. AT Enterprises, the letterhead in the drawer. He opens the next case, watching the irritating hourglass on the computer screen and asking himself for the thousandth time why they couldn’t have programmed the damn thing to actually fill with sand so you’d have some idea how far along you are. How difficult could it be? The
second disk is in a box that says COREL W
ORD
P
ERFECT,
but it too is home-burned. The notation says
“AT Series 600–699.”

He opens all the cases, arranging the disks by number. When he’s finished, he has a pile of jewel boxes on the floor and thirteen disks spread out across the desk, beginning with AT Series 0001–0099 and ending with 1500–1599. Missing are 500–599, 700–799, and 800–899.

The computer is ready at last. He slaps the 0001–0099 disk in the drive and looks at the directory.

The files are, as promised, numbered AT 0001 through AT 0099. They are .jpg files, which means pictures. His heart sinks at the information. He does not really think he wants to look at these.

And until he sees the first one, he has no idea how right he is.

CHOUK HAS ASKED
himself a hundred times whether he should make the payment he promised the guard. He knows the risks, knows it is one of the few times he will be exposed. For the first time since he intercepted the maid to take delivery of the money, he will have to arrange a meeting. Madame Wing will be far more vigilant, now that he has returned her money, shredded into scrap, and made his second demand.

How he wishes he could have been there when she opened the suitcases. Perhaps the guard knows how she reacted. That alone would almost be worth the risk of paying him.

Why had Tam looked at the photos? He has talked with Tam incessantly in his head since that night, trying to explain why he pulled the trigger: the risk that Tam would turn on him, that he would go to Madame Wing. No one can be allowed to prevent Chouk from completing his work. He has made promises to too many people who are now long gone.

But still, Tam had loved his wife, and she probably loved him in return. Chouk has ruined two lives.

It is fitting, he thinks, that Tam had known him by a different name. Chouk no longer knows who he is; he is as hollow as a ghost. All that remains is the course he has set. Motion is everything.

He is no longer Chouk Ran. He is just whoever it is who is doing this.

And she will pay for that, and for all those she destroyed.

But still, the bits of him that remain are troubled. He killed Tam, and if he does not pay the guard, he will have abandoned both of the people who helped him. He could not have done what he has already done without their aid. Even though they did it for money, not because they believed in his mission.

He looks around the rented room he has slept in for two nights. Unlike the flophouses, here there are no rows of bunks; it has a door and walls to keep people out. He needed the privacy to handle the money. The large shredder he bought at the office store gleams in the corner. He should probably change rooms, but he can’t face the work of moving the shredder. He had no idea how heavy it would be.

With a strong feeling he is doing the wrong thing, he goes down to the street to find a pay phone.

A CHEAP HOTEL
room. It could be any of a thousand hotels, anywhere in Southeast Asia. Cold light comes through a small window. It is probably raining.

The bed is narrow, with a garish red coverlet. The floor is dirty linoleum. There is no rug or other furniture except an attached bed table and a large, old-style phone with a dial.

A number hotel, maybe.

In 1982.

Uncle Claus’s camera had an automatic date-stamp function, and he occasionally forgot to turn it off. The picture on the screen is dated 9-16-82.

The little girl hog-tied on the bed was somewhere between eight and ten on September 16, 1982. The ropes bite into her wrists and ankles, and her defenseless stomach is bare and streaked with red.

She is crying.

The series began with photos of her wearing the clothes of poor Southeast Asian children everywhere: T-shirt, shorts, sandals. She
had been smiling in the first few shots. She stopped smiling when her clothes began to come off. She started crying when the hot red wax dripped from the candle onto her bare chest.

After he has looked at fifteen or twenty pictures, Rafferty gets up and goes to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. On his way back to the computer, he stops at the filing cabinet and, for the first time, forces himself to pull out the restraints, the leather straps and gags and handcuffs and the collar with the spikes set into its edges that are designed to cut into the neck and chest.

They are
tiny.

He returns to the screen and searches further through the pictures, feeling the fury rise in him, mixed with a swelling terror. He has difficulty forcing himself to keep his eyes on the screen, and he jumps to his feet and steps back, believing for a moment he will pass out, when he gets to the picture of the child with the electric iron on her chest. Her right arm is thrown over her eyes, her mouth wide in pain. Her ankles had been cuffed together so she couldn’t kick in self-defense.

He
was in some of the pictures, too, a naked fat man with his face crudely blacked out with Magic Marker. He held a camera remote in one hand, with a button at one end of it. He depressed the button to snap a picture whenever he was satisfied with the level of monstrosity being inflicted on the bright red bed.

There are almost
sixteen hundred
of them.

Rafferty feels the sickness and the fear rise up in him again, but he forces them away and then lets the fear back in, lets it drive him forward despite his revulsion as he keeps looking, opening one disk after another, paging through the photos as quickly as the computer will allow, looking at nothing but the faces and paying special attention to the later ones, the 1300, 1400, and 1500 series, some of which are date-stamped within the past three to four years. The most recent image with a date stamp, AT1548, was taken in 2003.