A Nail Through the Heart (22 page)

T
he motorcycle hits a pothole, and Rafferty is momentarily weightless. Then, as he hits the seat, he emphatically isn’t.

“We’re turning,” Rafferty’s motorcycle driver shouts into the wind blowing over his shoulder. “Hang on.”

For a long, stomach-sinking moment, Rafferty has the sensation of being almost parallel to the surface of the road as the tires squeal, slide sickeningly, and grip again. Then they are upright, and he focuses on the spots of light doing a Busby Berkeley number behind his closed eyelids. The cell phone pasted to his ear is slick with sweat.

“How far from Sukhumvit Soi 28?” Rafferty asks his driver.

“Three or four minutes.”

He opens his eyes in time to see the gray iron wall of a truck’s side inches from his elbow.

Rafferty has promised the driver two thousand baht for speed, an exorbitant sum, and the bike is at full throttle. Rush-hour cars and trucks hurtle by in a blur or loom massively in front of them, slipping
past at the last possible second by a few slim inches. He has a vision of himself spread across the roadway like peanut butter. A blind man could follow them by listening to the horns.

He forces himself to look past the traffic and focus on a more distant blur that resolves itself into shop fronts: tailors’ shops, jewelry stores, a coffin maker, a watch shop called Lovely Hours, a sign that says, in English,
WE HAVE ALL KINDS GRIT.
In other words, a typical Bangkok block. “Can we go any faster?”

The driver starts to turn his head and thinks better of it. “You’re joking.”

“He still hasn’t looked back,” Cho says through the cell phone.

“We’re almost there,” Rafferty says. “Just keep him in sight.” They hurtle past a sedan, children’s startled hands and faces pressed to the windows watching the crazy
farang
and his driver trying to kill themselves.

“Wait, wait,” Cho says on the phone. “They’re slowing down. They’re…um, they’re pulling over to the curb.”

“Is he getting out?” Rafferty asks Cho.

“No. Just sitting there.”

Rafferty’s stomach takes an anxious dip. “Maybe he spotted you.”

“I don’t think so. Hold it. A motorcycle taxi stopped next to the cab. The passenger is getting off it.”

“What’s he look like? Does he have a bad hand?”

“Yes, the left. He’s getting in the car. He’s got a blue bag with him. Like a bowling bag or something. Oh, my golly,” Cho says, a librarian to his fingertips. “They’re moving.”

“Sukhumvit coming up,” says Rafferty’s driver. The bike down-shifts and slows. “Hang on. Turn.”

Once again the bike yaws wildly, and Rafferty is flying sideways through the air, gripping the seat between his knees with all the strength he possesses. When they are vertical again, the driver says, “Sukhumvit,” as proudly as if he’d named it himself. The road stretches wide and congested in front of them, the sky crisscrossed with more electrical wires than any city would seem to need.

“What
soi
?”

“Thirty-two,” Cho says, and Rafferty’s driver says, “Sixteen.”

“This is interesting,” Cho says musingly. “That’s really inter—”

“Cho, I swear—”

“The motorbike is staying right behind the taxi.”

“Get closer. I don’t want him getting back on that motorbike. Run over the goddamned thing if you have to. What color is the car, Cho?” The motorcycle is zipping between lanes of relatively slow-moving cars, their rearview mirrors whipping past like chromium hands snatching at the bike.

“Red, a red taxi with a dented…um, left back fender.”

“First numbers on the plate.”

“Um…three, two.”

“Three-two!” Rafferty shouts to his driver. “Red taxi, license plate starts with three-two.”

“Got it!” the driver calls.

“Yeah, well, remember it.”

“No, I
got
it. Up there.” And Rafferty looks ahead and sees Cho’s car loafing along in front of them and, in front of that, the taxi.

Rafferty reaches into his pocket and pulls out a laundry receipt, a Kleenex, a paper clip, two stamps that have glued themselves together, a used movie ticket, one of Rose’s bobby pins, and—finally—his money. When he looks up, they are directly behind the bike that is following the red cab.

He slips the open phone into his shirt pocket and waves a fan of thousand-baht bills in front of the driver for about a tenth of a second. “Get next to him.”

“How close?”

“Close enough to smell him.”

The bike accelerates until they are within a foot of the motorcycle taxi that brought Chouk to the payoff. Its driver glances over at them, sees how close they are, and starts to yell a caution, and Rafferty pulls the Glock out of his pants and waves it. At the same moment, a head turns in the cab’s backseat, and Rafferty sees Chouk’s face for the first time.

Instead of peeling off in panic and fading into traffic, the other motorcycle driver guns his engine and cuts around to the rear door of the cab, between the cab and the cars parked at the curb. Chouk is staring back at them wide-eyed. He jerks a thumb at Rafferty and shouts something at the guard, who shakes his head and raises both hands in what looks like an angry denial. Chouk continues to shout, and suddenly he reaches over with his good hand and snatches back the blue bag.

“Stay right where we are,” Rafferty tells his driver. “Don’t get any closer.”

The other motorcycle driver is yelling at the window of the cab, some kind of urgent question, but Chouk does not seem to know he is there. The guard has lunged toward him and grabbed one of the bag’s straps, and the two of them struggle back and forth in a constricted tug-of-war, slamming against the cab’s doors. Chouk plants a foot high on the back of the driver’s seat for leverage and brings the ruined hand down on the guard’s shoulder, and the guard jerks back and drops the handle of the bag.

Chouk turns his head away to check the position of the motorcycle, and the guard reaches down and then brings his arm up, and something glints in his hand. He strikes Chouk in the right side once, pulling back quickly. Then he does it again.

Chouk’s head snaps back as though he has been hit by a train. He turns slowly to look at the guard, his face a mask of astonishment—mouth open, eyes enormous, his neck corded with fear or pain, or both. Then, moving in slow motion, he turns away again and puts out his right hand. He is going to open the door of the car.

The guard reaches over and grabs the blue bag.

“Get between them,” Rafferty says.

The driver’s back stiffens. “You’re crazy. There’s not enough—”

“Get between them. I don’t care if we hit the car.”

“Well, I do.”

Rafferty moves the gun forward so the driver can see it. “Get between them.”

“Getting between them,” the driver says.

He cuts to the left and aims for the sliver of daylight separating the cab and the motorcycle. Then the bike surges forward, and there is a protesting scrape of metal as the bike’s handlebar digs a long gouge in the cab’s rear fender. The friction pulls the front wheel around, and for an instant Rafferty thinks they are going down, but the driver reaches out with his hand and pushes them off the side of the cab, and they wobble once and then bump against the other bike.

The other driver has his lips peeled back in fury, and he reaches down into his coat pocket. Before the hand comes up, Rafferty lifts his right leg and kicks the bike’s gas tank. His own driver swears, and their bike swerves again into the side of the car, but the other bike careens away, its rider struggling to right it, and then it sideswipes a parked car and the front wheel turns ninety degrees. The last thing Rafferty sees is the bike cartwheeling, its rider in midair, already tucking his knees to try to somersault when he hits the street.

“Up to the driver’s door!” he shouts.

The bike leaps forward again. Rafferty’s driver is still swearing, a long, unbroken string of invective. When they are opposite the front window, Rafferty reaches over and taps it with the gun. The taxi driver’s head snaps around, and he sees the gun and hits the brakes so fast that the two men in the rear are thrown forward against the back of the seat in front of them. The instant the cab comes to a stop, the far door opens and the guard darts into traffic on foot, carrying the blue bag. He vanishes between cars.

Chouk does not move. He stares through the window as Rafferty approaches. He looks indifferent, even sleepy.

Rafferty pulls the door open and points the gun at him, and Chouk, who had been leaning on the door, unfolds slowly out of the car and hits the street facefirst. Rafferty steps back, then looks around and sees the staring crowd gathering on the curb, the fallen man at his feet with a pool of blood spreading beneath him, and Chouk’s motorcycle driver limping toward them with a wrench in his hand.

Rafferty yanks the cell phone from his pocket. “Goddamn it, Cho,” he shouts, “get up here and arrest me!”

NINETY MINUTES LATER
Poke’s friend Dr. Ratt comes out of the apartment bedroom with blood on his white sleeves.

“He’s lucky,” he says, heading for the kitchen as he peels off his latex gloves. “The knife hit the ribs. No punctured lung, no arterial damage. Just sliced muscles.” He turns on the water and pours liquid dishwashing detergent on his hands. “I sewed him up. He’s low on blood, ought to have a transfusion.”

“What happens if he doesn’t get the transfusion?”

“He’ll be pretty weak.”

“Weak is a good idea,” Rafferty says.

“Poke,”
Nui scolds, emerging from the bedroom in her latest silk nurse’s uniform. This one is salmon-colored.

“This isn’t Albert Schweitzer, Nui. He killed a man earlier this week.”

“Really?” Dr. Ratt’s tone is skeptical. “He’s awfully sweet to be a killer.”

“He also stole a bunch of money.”

“How much?” Nui handles the finances for her husband’s mobile medical practice.

“Ten million baht.”

Dr. Ratt whistles and Nui says happily, “Then he can pay us.”

“Not exactly. He shredded it.”

Dr. Ratt pauses and lifts a soapy hand. “He…”

“Shredded it. Then he sent it back.”

“What was the point? The emptiness of materialism?” Nui asks. “This is an unusually spiritual attitude in a thief.”

“Actually, I think he was trying to piss somebody off.”

Dr. Ratt shakes water from his hands. “Who was the man he killed?”

“Paper towels are under the sink,” Rafferty says. “The man who helped him in the robbery.”

Dr. Ratt drops from sight beneath the counter and resurfaces with
a roll of paper towels. “Let me play this back. This man, who is really extremely nice, Poke, even cultured, robs someone, kills somebody else while he’s committing a robbery, and then shreds the…the…”

“Loot,” Nui supplies.

“…the loot, and sends it back?”

“I know,” Poke says. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either. He and I need to have a chat.”

“You lead an interesting life, Poke,” Nui says. “
We
don’t know anybody who’s shredded ten million baht. How’s Miaow?”

“She’s an angel.”

“And Rose?” Her long, sleepy eyes come up to his. There is more than casual interest in them.

“Ah, well,” Rafferty says, and realizes he is blushing.

“Whoops,” Nui says. “Perhaps I’m intruding.”

“Nui, when there’s something to know, you’ll know it. How badly injured is he?”

“Nothing life-threatening. It’ll be a week to ten days before he can get around comfortably. He’s going to have very limited movement in his right arm for a while. What in the world happened to his left hand?”

“One of the things he and I are going to discuss.”

“What it looks like,” Dr. Ratt says, “is that somebody yanked three of his fingernails with a pair of pliers and then put the hand on something flat and hit it a couple of times with a sledgehammer.”

“Yikes,” Rafferty says.

“Most of the bones are broken in several places. There was obviously no kind of medical attention. I’ve seen injuries like it—” He stops, looking embarrassed.

“Where? Where have you seen injuries like it?”

“Beggars,” Dr. Ratt says. He is blushing at being caught in a good deed. “I treat beggars one day a week.”

“Why would beggars—”

“They’re Cambodian beggars. Old enough to have been in the Khmer Rouge prisons.”

“Jesus freaking Christ,” Rafferty says. He sits heavily on the couch.

“Excuse me?” Nui always wants to learn new English.

“It’s an idiom Americans use when enlightenment strikes.” He puts his hands to his head and massages his temples. “It’s always enlightening to realize you’re an idiot.”

T
he boy slows the moment he comes through the door, looking at the spots of blood that dapple the carpet like a spill of bright red coins. He follows the trail with his eyes to the closed door of the bedroom, and then he turns questioningly to Rafferty. He seems more curious than alarmed, as if blood falls into the category of the everyday.

“We have a guest.” Rafferty is in the kitchen, pouring bottled water into smaller bottles and spilling quite a bit of it. “He’s asleep. He was hurt pretty badly, so let’s all be quiet.”

“Your friend?” The boy glances again at the blood. He is wearing the last of his new shirts. He has worn each of the others two or three times, until the fold marks from the store disappeared. The sharp-edged rectangle across his chest makes him look like somebody who is shoplifting a book.

“Not a friend. He killed somebody.” The boy’s eyes kindle with interest. “He’s handcuffed to the bed, and I want you to stay out of there.”

“Just because he killed somebody doesn’t mean he’s a bad man,” the boy says in a reasonable tone.

“It doesn’t make him a good one either. It’s hard to think of a solid reason for murdering someone.”

“I can think of lots of them,” the boy says.

“Well, keep them to yourself.”

“What happened to him?”

“He ran into a knife that someone was holding.”

“Knives are no good. They only work up close. And they’re messy.” He kicks at a blood spot as though he expects it to skip across the carpet. “Have you ever killed anybody?” The boy’s tone is conversational, but his eyes have the same kind of intensity Rafferty saw in the garage, the first time Superman looked at him.

“No.”

“Think you could?”

Rafferty’s silence stretches so long that the boy shrugs and starts to turn away. “I don’t know,” he says at last.

“Okay.” The boy swivels his head toward the closed door. “You call the police?”

“Not yet.”

“Good.” He turns and starts down the hall to Miaow’s room.

“Wait.” The boy stops at the sound of Rafferty’s voice but doesn’t look back. “Why did you leave Phuket?”

Rafferty has been speaking Thai, but the boy reverts to broken English. “You say what?”

“You wouldn’t tell Miaow why you left Phuket. I want to know.”

Superman turns and regards him soberly long enough for Rafferty to think he will speak, but then he turns and continues down the hall. The door closes behind him.

Rafferty grabs one of the small bottles of water and follows the trail of blood into his bedroom.

Chouk’s eyes open as Rafferty comes in. If he is frightened, it does not show in his face. He looks like a man who woke up in a strange place and is waiting until he remembers where he is.

“Are you thirsty?”

Chouk smiles. It is, as Dr. Ratt said, a sweet smile. “Thank you. I’m afraid you will have to hold the bottle.” His ruined hand is cuffed to the frame of the bed, and the right arm is motionless beneath the covers. Dr. Ratt taped it to his side, mummy style, to keep him from tearing the damaged muscles.

“No problem.” Rafferty raises the bottle to Chouk’s lips and tilts it, and the man drinks half of it in one long series of gulps. When he is finished, he lifts his chin, and Rafferty removes the bottle.

“I didn’t know I was thirsty.” Chouk’s voice is soft, even refined. He speaks Thai fluently but with a distinct accent. He sounds like a university professor.

“You lost a lot of blood.”

“Ah, well. Not enough, apparently.”

Rafferty grimaces. “A little melodramatic.”

Chouk’s eyes come to his, blank as the windows of an abandoned building. Whatever was once behind them has moved on. “I hope not. There has been more than enough melodrama in my life. There has been more than enough of practically everything.” He smiles again, but the expression in his eyes does not change. “And so
much
of it was given to me by one person.”

“Madame Wing.”

He nods approvingly, a teacher pleased by the performance of a particularly bright student. “Are you working for her?”

Rafferty gives the question the thought it deserves. “I don’t know.”

Chouk rolls toward him, forgetting the cuff, which tightens and makes the bed creak ominously. “Either you’re working for her or you’re not.”

“I
was
working for her. Am I working for her now? It’s all a matter of information, isn’t it? We make our choices depending on the information at our disposal. I’m sort of wondering what your information is. I can’t say I like her much.”

Chouk takes it in, looking at nothing. “Is she paying you a lot?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s no way I can compete there.”

“No. You were pretty decisive about that.”

Chouk laughs. “And I just gave away my last million.”

“You seemed to have second thoughts in the cab.”

“I thought he’d led you to me.”

“He did, but he didn’t know it.”

“I should have guessed. He’s not the hardest man to fool.”

“If he were any dumber, he wouldn’t have thumbs.”

A shake of the head, so tiny it is barely a movement at all.

“So you can’t give me money,” Rafferty says. “Tell me about Madame Wing instead. But listen, you have to know that I’m going to turn you over to the cops no matter what you say.”

Chouk settles back on the pillows and regards him out of the corners of his eyes. “Because I shot Tam.”

“He had a wife.”

“I know. He said her name before he began to work on the safe.
Mai.
He said it like a prayer. I have regretted shooting him every minute since it happened. Since I did it, I mean. It didn’t
happen.
I pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. It felt at the time like I had no choice, but of course I did.” His head drops back onto the pillow, and he draws several short breaths.

“Because he saw what was in the safe.”

Chouk’s black eyes come to him and lock on his, and something flickers in them. “Do you know what was in it? Did she tell you?”

“No.”

“I thought not. She’d have to kill you. Are you curious?”

“A man was murdered for it. A terrible old woman paid you ten million baht for it. Of course I’m curious.”

“Yes,” Chouk says listlessly. His brief flare of interest seems to have burned itself out. More than anything, he looks exhausted. “You’d think it was something important, wouldn’t you?”

“Isn’t it?”

“To a couple of people. For most of the world, it’s not worth five baht. I suppose it was important once, a long time ago, when someone could have done something about it. The worst thing is, there was probably no reason to shoot Tam at all.”

Chouk turns away. “I’m going to jail,” he says. It sounds like he is trying the idea on.

“Afraid so.”

“It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t finish now anyway.”

“Finish what?”

“Reducing her to ash,” he says mildly. “Making her feel as much pain as possible and then reducing her to ash.”

“What did she do to you?”

“What did she do to me?” His eyes close slowly, and his lips curve into the ghost of a smile. “What didn’t she do? I could tell you a story, but it would only be a story, about a lot of people you don’t know. People who wouldn’t be real to you, a time that wouldn’t be real to you. I can show you, though. And I will. You should know who you’re working for.” He jerks against the chain connecting the handcuffs to the bed. “Unlock these and I’ll show you.”

“Can’t.”

“It’s not here,” Chouk says, his voice urgent for the first time. “It’s in my room. The thing that explains Madame Wing.”

“Sorry. You’re here for the duration.”

“What would I escape to? I can’t use my good hand anymore. I couldn’t finish even if I were free.”

“You’ll heal.”

“It’ll be too late by then. It had to be done by day after tomorrow.”

“Why the day after tomorrow?”

“Later,” he says. “After you see.”

“Just out of curiosity, what were you going to do with the deed to her house?”

Chouk’s smile is broad and sudden. “I was going to make it out to Vinai Pimsopat and send it to him. Anonymously, from a grateful constituent.”

Rafferty laughs. Pimsopat is a notoriously venal politician, even by Southeast Asian standards, a short, fat, black hole into which enormous quantities of government funds disappear. His nickname in the press is “The Scoop.”

“She’d have had a hard time getting it back.”

“It would have cost her another ten or twenty million baht. Most of all, it would have frightened her.”

Rafferty says, “Where’s your room?”

“Not far. We can get there in twenty minutes.”

“Not you. You’re not supposed to move around yet.”

“And you’re probably not going to wander off and leave me here, so who can go?”

Rafferty gets up and goes to the door and pulls it open. “We’ll send Superman,” he says. “After all, he’s faster than a speeding bullet.”

“ON APRIL SEVENTEENTH, 1975,
the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh,” Chouk is saying. His voice is weak but steady. “We all stood in the streets and cheered. Cambodia was going to belong to Cambodians again. Our country had been sold out from under us. Lon Nol didn’t care about the people; all he wanted to do was milk the Americans for more money. The Americans had decided that the central Vietcong headquarters were in Cambodia, even though there
weren’t
any central Vietcong headquarters. So America sent the bombers.” His ruined hand describes an arc until the handcuff stops it and then lands next to a plate containing half a sandwich. Rafferty had fed it to him until he shook his head. “A lot of Cambodian people died. Men, women, old people, children. The Americans were killing us every day of the week, dropping fire out of the sky on nuns and babies, and the government just sat there with its hand out saying ‘No problem, send money.’”

“While people died.”

“The Americans gave the Khmer Rouge the only thing they’d been missing: an enemy everyone could hate. The Khmer Rouge moved in, and Lon Nol ran like a rabbit.” He takes a shaky breath. “What I remember most clearly is how young they were. The soldiers. They looked like children. Some of them actually
were
children, of course, and we’d learn more about that later. The way the Khmer Rouge used children, I mean.” He squeezes his eyes closed and shifts his weight, easing the strain on the bandaged arm.

“Do you want to rest?”

A tightening of the mouth, a dry swallow. “I want to talk.”

“Your call.”

“Phnom Penh was a beautiful city, with broad boulevards and graceful buildings and trees everywhere. It had shade, the river, the flat plain, with its one hill and the temple on top of it.” He is looking at the opposite wall, and his eyes and voice are soft. “I loved the city then. I played violin in the symphony orchestra. I taught music. I had—” He stops and swallows. “A wife. Sophea. Two children. Two girls. Eleven and thirteen.”

A tear slides down his cheek, but he seems not to notice. He doesn’t even blink his eyes against the moisture. “So they came. We cheered for them. We invited them into our homes and fed them. We had victory parties. Two days later they began to empty the city.

“They said everyone was going to work the soil.” Chouk is speaking so softly Rafferty has to lean forward to hear. Superman has been gone more than an hour. It is getting dark in the room. “It took them three days to drive everyone out, even the sick people in the hospitals. Six hundred thousand people in three days. We were each allowed to carry as much of our lives as we could squeeze into one bag.”

He puts his head back as far as he can, stretching the long muscles in his neck. “The bag was a trap. On the way out of the city, the soldiers stopped and searched everyone. Anybody who had packed a book was killed. Anybody with soft hands—‘office hands’—was killed. Anybody who wore spectacles was shot or beaten to death.” He closes his eyes and rolls his head slowly from side to side. “My family stood in line with soldiers on either side, holding one another’s hands, with our bags packed full of books, some of them in English. I had my violin. We were waiting to die.” He is breathing rapidly and shallowly, as though he were once again lined up, waiting for his bullet.

“This can wait,” Rafferty says.

“When it came to be my family’s turn, an officer stepped forward and stopped the soldiers from opening our bags. We were led to one side and told to wait. I later found out he’d been a subscriber to the
symphony. He’d seen me play the Beethoven Concerto in D. He’d enjoyed it. The soldiers took us back to the city, back to our own house. They put guards all around us, as though we had anywhere to run when the whole country was being turned into a prison.

“So we were still in Phnom Penh when the bombing started. They blew up the banks, the libraries, the churches, the hospitals, anything with ties to the West. There were going to be no foreign influences in the Year Zero. That’s what they called it, the Year Zero, the glorious new beginning.” He stops and opens his eyes. “Could I have some water?”

Rafferty raises the bottle to Chouk’s lips. One swallow, two, and then Chouk lifts his chin: enough.
“Glory,”
he says. “It was about glory. We—Cambodia, I mean—were going to return to our days of glory, the days of Angkor, when Khmer kings ruled most of Southeast Asia.” The sound he makes might be a laugh, or just something caught in his throat. “Of course, the days of Angkor were a thousand years ago. That was Pol Pot’s great leap forward—ten centuries into the past.”

“I wasn’t aware there were a lot of violinists at Angkor.”

Chouk’s grin is quick and white, with no more humor in it than the laugh had. “They were such hypocrites. The fat boys—Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, all of them—had been rich kids. They went to school in Paris. The people, the ordinary people, were sealed off from the West—from books and ideas and even medicine. But the fat boys liked music.”

“And that saved you.”

“In a manner of speaking, I suppose it did.” He starts suddenly and looks around the room at the darkness, as though he is just noticing the passage of time. “Where’s the boy?”