A Nail Through the Heart (26 page)

“Then he took both of us,” she says. She watches him for a reaction. “Sisters. Some men like sisters, you know? They like them—together. He made us do things to each other. Sex things. Then…” She falters. Looks down at her lap. He sees that the part in her hair is straight enough to have been cut with a knife.

Like Miaow’s.

The perfection of Miaow’s part is one of the ways she proves she can control things. He mentally waves the image away, but it persists. “Then what?”

“Then this,” she says. “This is something you haven’t seen.”

She swivels in her chair and turns on the television set. It blossoms into electronic snow until she pushes a button on the remote. “He took a few of these,” she says, waiting for the picture. “But the camera was too bulky, and he couldn’t work it with a remote, so he had to stop playing with us to make the video.” The familiar room blinks onto the screen. “But he took this one because it was special.”

The image is mercifully low-resolution, the product of a cheap video camera from more than twenty years ago. A small naked brown girl, barely recognizable as Doughnut, is on the red coverlet. Her wrists have been tied to her ankles, which are separated by metal cuffs
with a two-foot rod between them. The bindings open and lift her legs and arms, leaving her splayed and helpless on her back.

A slightly larger girl, also naked, enters the picture from the left. She is already crying.

“Toom,” Doughnut says.

Toom sits on the bed next to Doughnut and gently reaches over to smooth her sister’s hair, which is plastered with sweat to her face. The camera jumps, and Toom yanks her arm back as though Doughnut were a live wire. Then, jerkily, the camera moves in on the two girls. Doughnut has her eyes closed, and her face is vacant, almost otherworldly, but Toom watches with enormous eyes as the camera advances on her.

A hand comes into the frame, holding a lighted cigar. The hand is shaking, and Rafferty realizes that the camera is shaking, too. Claus Ulrich is excited.

Toom waves the cigar away and hangs her head. The hand disappears and comes back without the cigar, and then it moves too fast for the camera to track and backhands Toom across the face. Toom’s face snaps around, the short hair flying, and she is knocked sideways across Doughnut. Doughnut’s eyes remain closed. When the hand reenters the frame, it has the cigar in it again.

Without opening her eyes, Doughnut says something to her sister.

This time, very slowly, Toom takes it. With the cigar pressed between the first and second fingers of her right hand, she does the best she can to make a very high
wai
to her sister, who has opened her eyes.

Doughnut smiles at her.

“Turn it off,” Rafferty says. His voice is a rasp. He has looked away from the screen, but he doesn’t even want the images in his peripheral vision.

“It goes on for quite a while,” Doughnut says, snapping the set off. “Although at the time it seemed much longer.”

Rafferty reaches reflexively for another cigarette, catches himself.

“So, two nights later, I broke a window and went out through it. Cut myself here.” She swipes at the scar on her chin. “I had to do it, for Toom. She hadn’t stopped crying since she hurt me. I thought she
was going to cry herself to death. I couldn’t help her while I was inside, so I got out. My first night out, I met Coke on the street.”

“Coke?”

“The short one,” she says, indicating the vanished men with her chin. “He was little, but he liked me, and he helped me. And he had something I needed.”

“What?” Coke and Doughnut.

“A gun.” She brings the black eyes up to his, as though to make sure he is listening. “I had to get Toom out, so I needed a gun. I didn’t know they had cut her to get even with me for escaping. Cut her here.” She raises a leg and draws a quick line across her Achilles tendon.

The flopping foot. “Who did?”

“The two Chinese men.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t go after them, too.”

Doughnut stubs out her half-smoked cigarette on the tabletop, being very careful to fold it over neatly before she drops it on the floor. She looks down at it and twists her shoe on it, killing it dead.

“Well, sure,” Rafferty says. Despite his mounting revulsion—at what he has seen, at what she has done—he can’t help seeing her as Miaow grown up, a Miaow for whom things had gone differently, things over which she had no control. The plain brown face, the dark hair, the knife-edge part. He realizes she is talking.

“…finally, Lee, the one who liked to beat the girls, drove her out and took her to a number hotel, and I got off Coke’s motorcycle and walked into the parking lot, just as Lee got out of the car. I shot him there, and we took Toom. When I saw her foot, I decided to kill Kwan, too.” She lets her chin fall onto her chest, the first time she has betrayed anything like exhaustion. “And I did, about eight months later.” She sounds as calm as someone describing what she had for dinner. “A week after my twelfth happy birthday. Then I went off with Toom and Coke, and we made a life.”

As she describes it, it had not been a conventional household. Coke robbed people and sent Doughnut to school with the money he stole, while Toom kept house. Doughnut learned English and computer skills and thought about Claus.

“How did you find him?”

“I didn’t. I just saw him on the street. Big as ever. Just walking along, like a real person. You want to hear something funny? I was terrified.” She brings her right hand to her heart and taps, twice. “
Terrified.
He was exactly the same. He looked at me like I wasn’t there, and I realized he didn’t know who I was. I smiled at him.” She fiddles with the package of cigarettes and then pushes it aside. “I think that was the hardest thing, that smile, that I ever did. He nodded and walked right past. So I turned around and followed him, and then I knew where he lived. Easy. I could hardly believe it.”

“I think I know some of the rest of it,” Rafferty says. He tells her what he has learned about Noot and Bangkok Domestics and Madame Wing. “So you got in, and there you were. In that apartment. Just you and Claus.”

She nods. Then she reaches up and smooths her hair.

“How did you stand it?”

Her fingers find the cigarettes again, and she takes one out without looking at it. “No problem. It was almost fun. I was nice to him. I cooked and cleaned and took care of him like he was a big, fat, ugly, smelly baby. He stank of meat. He had hair on his back, like a monkey. He poured sweet stuff all over himself because he smelled so bad. I told him he was handsome. Why do men always believe they are handsome? I made him
love
me. He called me his little
sugar doughnut.
” She spits the English words like hard seeds, as though she expects them to bounce on the table. “I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to think I loved him. Like Toom loved me, like somebody sometime must have loved all those girls he hurt. It was
necessary
for him to think I loved him.”

“Because it wasn’t enough just to kill him.”

She places the unlit cigarette between her index fingers as though she is measuring it and looks at him over it. “Would you think it was enough?”

Rafferty does not answer, just regards the small, dark, harmless-looking girl sitting opposite him in her pastel clothes. Looks at the clean, cropped nails; the bright, childish plastic bracelet; the metic
ulously brushed hair. Looks at the child tied to the bed. Doughnut.

Who could have been Miaow.

She returns his gaze impassively and lets the cigarette fall to the table. “Well, it wasn’t. First he had to trust me. Then he had to love me. Then he had to do something good, just once in his life.”

“He already had,” Rafferty says. “Clarissa. The niece.”

She moves her head to one side, dodging the words. “For
me.
He had to do something for me, so he could feel good about himself. Feel good about being alive.”

“Jesus,” Rafferty says.

“So I borrowed money from him. I told him my family needed it, which was true. I gave him some time to feel what it was like to be good, to be proud of himself. I gave him a week, thanked him every day. Told him he had saved my mama’s life by buying medicine for her. He was so proud of himself that he went on a diet. Then I fell in my bathroom. I screamed. He ran in to help me. Feeling like a hero. I’d thought about where to do it while I polished all that furniture. I needed him to be in the bathroom.”

“For cleanup.” He is watching her eyes, trying to see the person behind them. Only when she catches him and glances down does he see a crack in the surface, a vulnerability in the shell.

She does not look back up. “He lifted me off the floor and sat me on the edge of the tub, and I shot him in the leg. Then I shot him in the other leg.”

“You were close to him.”

“I wanted to be close. I would have liked to have been inside him, so I could know how much it hurt. After he fell down, I shot him again, very low in the stomach.”

“Ouch,” Rafferty says.

“I stood in the tub, waiting to make sure he couldn’t move. His eyes were open, looking at me like I was something he’d never seen before. Something he’d never imagined. I suppose I was. A girl hurting
him.
I suppose it was something new.”

Rafferty thinks for a moment about what he wants to say. “You can live a long time with a stomach wound.”

“And I let him. I told him all about it. Everything he had done to me.” For a moment she seems puzzled, and she looks back up at him with something like an appeal in her eyes. “He didn’t
remember
me. He had me confused with another girl. I’d thought about him every day for years, and he didn’t remember me. But when I talked about Toom, about us being sisters,
then
he remembered. You know what he said?”

Rafferty discovers that he doesn’t really want to know. He lifts a palm.

“He said, ‘Those were good pictures.’ So I shot him in the head.”

She slumps back in her seat. “I was tired,” she says. “I didn’t mean to let him go that fast.”

Rafferty reaches across the table, picks up the cigarette she dropped, and lights it. Feels the good poison course through him, killing him a little but not quite enough. “Have you ever cried about all this?”

Her chin comes up and her lips thin, and for a second Rafferty thinks he is seeing the face Ulrich must have seen in his last minutes. “About what happened to you, what happened to Toom. Did you ever take the time to cry over it?”

“Toom cried,” she says flatly. “One of us had to be the dry one. One of us had to do something about it.”

“Then what
do
you feel? Now that it’s over.”

She stretches across, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and puts it between her lips. “I feel like I made a mistake.”

It is not the answer he expects. “You do?”

“I should have waited. I should have let him lose some more weight on his diet. Take it from me. If you’re going to shoot somebody and you have to get rid of the body, choose someone thin.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“But I couldn’t wait. Do you want to know why?”

“I think I do,” Rafferty says. “He had packed a bag. He was going somewhere, wasn’t he? Somewhere where he could get hold of some kids.”

“I’m impressed,” she says, not sounding particularly impressed. She looks down at the cigarette. “I miss him, in a way,” she says thoughtfully. “He gave me something to do.”

“Can I have the cigarette back?”

She passes it over to him, shaking her head. “I didn’t know I’d taken it.”

“Anybody left?” he asks. She glances up at him, eyebrows raised. “Are you at the end of your list, Doughnut, or is somebody left?”

Another shake of the head, without much behind it. “Finished.”

“What about the lady who brought you to Bangkok?”

“That was only business. If I kill everybody who does business, there won’t be anybody left. No. They were different. They needed to die.”

Rafferty sucks deeply on the cigarette, replaying the remark in his head. Then he hands the cigarette back to her. He gets up, feeling light-headed and profoundly doubtful about what he is going to do. “Okay.”

She looks startled, something he didn’t know she had left in her. “Okay?”

“Okay. That’s it. I asked, you told me. The end.”

She studies his face. “Do you mean that? No police?”

“The way I look at it,” he says, “this wasn’t murder. It was self-defense. It was just a little late.” She sits there, immobile, and her eyes drop again, and some of the rigidity leaves her shoulders.

He goes to the door behind her and turns back, looking at that perfectly controlled hair. “Doughnut,” he says, and she brings her head around and gazes up at him, looking younger and more open from this perspective. “You swear you’re finished, yes?”

She nods. “Yes,” she says. She touches her heart with her index finger. “Promise.” Then she smiles at him. “If I weren’t finished, you’d be carried out of here with the dead flowers.”

C
larissa Ulrich says, “I’m going home.”

“I’m sorry, Clarissa,” he says. The telephone is slippery in his hand. Superman turned off the air-conditioning while Rafferty was gone, and the apartment is stifling. He has been home half an hour, too exhausted to get up from the couch and start the air flowing.

“Sorry about what?”

“Sorry I couldn’t do anything that helped. Sorry about what I did do. The filing cabinet.” He hasn’t told her about Doughnut, and he can’t imagine that he will.

“I suppose I had to find out about him sooner or later,” she says bravely. She sounds to Rafferty like a child who has survived a trip to the dentist, although he knows the comparison’s not fair, that she has been permanently damaged, to use Rose’s word, by what has happened to her in Bangkok. “Not much point in believing he was a good man if he wasn’t.”

The urge to offer comfort is overwhelming. “He was good to you. That counts for something.”

“He was a man.” Her voice seems to sour and curl at the edges. “That’s about all he was.”

There is a silence, which Rafferty uses to get to his feet and turn on the air-conditioning unit. It belches once and starts spewing hot air, rich with Bangkok exhaust. He stands in front of it, letting it hit him in the face. It smells better to him than the flowers. He never wants to smell another flower.

“I’m not necessarily finished, Clarissa,” he says, although up to that moment he had figured he was.

“Please,” she says. “You’ve been very sweet, but I don’t need anything more. He’s dead, or he might as well be. And I’m alive, and I have to figure out what to do about that. He’s not coming home, not ever.” Her voice is thin as a ribbon. “I shouldn’t have come in the first place.”

“You had to. You owed him that.”

He can almost hear her shrug, see the expression on her face. “I guess.”

“When do you go?”

“Tomorrow night. I couldn’t get on a flight any sooner. Apparently there are lots of people who want to get out of here.” A short laugh, more like a cough. “Can’t imagine why.”

“Well, maybe I can do something by then. Don’t leave without calling me, okay?”

“What? What could you possibly do?”

Good question. “I’m still checking on a couple of things.” One possibility occurs to him as he says the words, but it will require yet another favor of Arthit. At least this one won’t threaten Arthit’s career.

“I’ll call,” Clarissa says, “even if it’s just to say thanks,” and she hangs up.

Rafferty throws the telephone at the couch, harder than he means to, and then has to go pick it up and make sure it still has a dial tone. It does, but that doesn’t make him feel any better. He puts the phone
on the table and goes into the kitchen for a beer. It’s still early for a drink, but what the hell. He’s just let a triple murderer walk away without so much as a slap on the wrist and allowed her only innocent victim, Clarissa, to go home with her life shattered. He’s about to put a good man in jail. He’s inveigled his best friend into something that could endanger both his job and his wife. He’s sending a woman—a dreadful, unforgivable woman, but a human being nonetheless—to her death. A beer sounds right. Give him a little perspective.

Chouk looks around when Rafferty stalks into the bedroom. The television is on, the screen full of writhing snakes. The Discovery Channel has come to Bangkok. He downs the beer in four long gulps, picks up the remote, and kills the TV, wishing there were a button that would make it explode. “Today,” he says.

“As good as any other,” Chouk says.

Rafferty scoots Chouk over as far as the constraints will permit. Then he unlocks the cabinet and shoves aside the stack of CD-ROMs from Claus Ulrich’s apartment. The tidy pile collapses. Behind them is an envelope. He takes it out and drops it on the bed, relocks the cabinet, and hangs the chain with the key on it around his neck.

“The cop who’s coming is okay,” he says shortly. “You can trust him.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Chouk says.

“Yeah, I’d imagine you do. We’re through with these things anyway.” He goes around the bed, fumbling through his ring of keys until he finds the one for the cuffs. With the key in the lock, he pauses. “The kid didn’t undo these, did he? He could probably unlock Buckingham Palace.”

“No. He just brought me the food and fed it to me, and took the little girl to school,” Chouk says. Rafferty unsnaps the cuff and lets it dangle from the bed frame. “He’s a nice kid.”

Rafferty straightens, feeling his back tighten and creak from sheer accumulated tension. “‘Nice’ may not be the precise word.”

“Nice is for rich people,” Chouk says, flexing his ruined hand to the limits of its mobility. To Rafferty it looks like a spasm. “The rest of us do the best we can.”

Rafferty tears his eyes away from the hand. “Are you even remotely interested in what’s going to happen to you today?”

“No.” Chouk sits up stiffly. Dr. Ratt has untaped his arm from his side, but the ribs are still tightly wrapped. The white bandages make his torso look darker than mahogany. “Be right back.” He takes tentative steps, heading for the bathroom.

Returning to the kitchen, Rafferty tosses the beer toward the trash can, misses, and kicks it with all his strength. It bounces off the wall and hits him in the shin, and he jumps into the air and lands on the can with both feet, mashing it flat. Then he kicks it again, and it slides under the stove.

“And fuck you, too,” Rafferty says to it. “Stay there.” He pulls open the refrigerator. “More perspective,” he says, taking another beer. The doorbell rings.

Rafferty shifts the can of beer to his left hand and, just in case, pulls the gun with his right. He positions himself in front of the door, holding the gun at gut-shot level, and says, “It’s not locked.”

Arthit pushes the door open and looks from the gun to the beer. “Not a difficult choice,” he says, taking the beer.

“You’re early,” Rafferty grumbles, heading back to the kitchen.

“Good morning to you, too. I would have brought you a Danish, but I thought it might endanger our relationship with Scandinavia.”

Only two beers left, a Singha and an Angkor, from Cambodia, that Rafferty doesn’t recall buying. He takes the Singha. The toilet flushes.

“Our boy?” Arthit says, leaning against the kitchen counter.

“Let’s not be breezy,” Rafferty says, ripping the tab off the can. “I can handle just about anything except breezy.”

“I treasure these moments,” Arthit says, and drinks. “When I look back on this part of my life, these little talks will be marked in yellow highlighter.” He drinks again, crumples the can, and tosses. The can hits the wastebasket, a slam dunk, and Arthit regards Rafferty expectantly.

“Would you like my last beer?”

“Sure,” Arthit says. “What else are you going to do with it?”

“Aren’t you on duty or something?”

“The law never sleeps.”

“Maybe not, but sometimes it sits for long periods of time with its eyes closed and its mouth open.”

“Gosh, I hate to cut this short.” Arthit pushes himself away from the counter. “There’s never enough time in the day, is there?”

“Wait, Arthit. I’ve been talking with our murderer, and I think we can do this without getting you in trouble with the folks who are protecting Madame Wing.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said all day.” Arthit folds his hands in front of him, looking patient.

“It’s very simple. You arrest him for Tam’s murder and everybody just leaves Madame Wing out of it.”

Arthit nods slowly, like someone who is too polite to disagree. “A ten-million-baht ransom, paid and shredded, a safe dug up in the backyard of a rich and powerful woman, something taken out of it that was apparently
worth
ten million baht, a guard who got paid off to let the thieves in—none of that’s likely to surface. Not worth a mention.”

“Totally extraneous,” Rafferty says. “Didn’t even happen. They were planning a crime, and they got drunk down near the river, which is why Tam was covered with mud. They got into a fight, and Chouk shot him.”

“So it was a spat.” Arthit clears his throat. “A falling-out among thieves.”

“He was drunk. He’s been regretting it ever since. That’s why he’s coming forward to confess, as you cops like to say. This is true, by the way. He wants to atone for what he did.”

“And you can keep it that way?”

“Yeah. He’ll play, and who else is going to volunteer information? Madame Wing? She’s not going to be talking to anybody. Look, it’s everything you could want: You get to arrest someone for Tam’s murder—someone who actually
did
it, no less—there’s lots of nice evidence, and you don’t have to be the cop who links Tam’s murder to the rich widow and all her inconvenient connections. They didn’t even get around to the robbery. He just confesses and goes to jail.”

“Does he have money for jail?”

“He will.”

There is a pause long enough for Arthit to take his own temperature. “Poke,” he says at last, “tell me you’re not supplying it.”

“Okay, Arthit, I’m not supplying it.”

Arthit starts to say something, but he is cut off.

“Is this the one?” Chouk asks from the living room.

“Chouk, this is Arthit,” Rafferty says, “and vice versa. You know which is which.” A wave of dizziness overtakes him. “Why don’t you two boys chat while I get rid of this beer?”

When he has finished vomiting the beer into the toilet, he washes his mouth out with Listerine and brushes his teeth hard enough to make his gums bleed. His mouth still tastes foul. He grabs the envelope from the bed and goes into the living room, where Chouk and Arthit have claimed the couch.

“Here.” He pitches the envelope to Chouk. “That’s fifteen hundred U.S. I’ll have more in a couple of days.”

“I can’t take this,” Chouk says, not touching it.

“It’s Madame Wing’s,” Rafferty says. “The rest of it will be Madame Wing’s, too. In a manner of speaking.”

“You’re going to want money in jail,” Arthit says to Chouk. “It makes a big difference. A cell by yourself, maybe a carpet, a girl every now and then.” He gets up and pulls the wrinkles out of his trousers. “Let’s leave Mr. Sunshine here and get you to jail, where people are pleasant.”

WHEN THEY ARE
gone, Rafferty sits absolutely still at his desk for the better part of fifteen minutes. He does a quick survey of his life and comes up with three shining exceptions to the landscape of flat tires, tin cans, and free-floating injury he’s been inhabiting since his talk with Doughnut: Rose, Miaow’s adoption, and the progress with Superman.

The moment Superman enters his mind, the phone rings.

“Poke?” Hank Morrison says. “Is this a good time?”

“Depends on you. Is there anything new?”

“I think I’ve got a guy at a school who’ll take Superman,” Morrison says. “But he’s a little iffy. I think some shock therapy will push him over the edge. Do you still have those pictures?”

“Until I figure out how to throw them away. They’re not something you toss in the trash.”

“Well, e-mail me a couple of the ones with the boy in them. Nothing too hair-raising. I want to convince him, not give him a heart attack.”

“Jesus, Hank, that means I have to look at them again.”

“Up to you,” Morrison says. “But it’ll help.”

“Hang on a minute.” Rafferty gets up, phone in hand, and forces himself to go into the bedroom. The closed door to the safe looks far too benign, considering what it’s hiding. Rafferty reluctantly puts his hand on the key hanging around his neck.

“Okay, Hank. Look for them in a few minutes, and for Christ’s sake don’t let anyone else open your e-mail.”

“Thanks, Poke. I’m pretty sure this will do it.”

Morrison hangs up, and Rafferty works the chain off his neck and opens the safe. The CDs slide out in a long spill across the surface of the bed. He flips open the cases as though they contained venomous snakes and finds the two he thinks the boy’s photos will be on, then carries them back into the living room.

It takes him five or ten dreadful minutes to find what he’s looking for. He chooses two from relatively early in the sequence, before the bestiality reached its crescendo, and mails them off. Then he closes the lid of the computer in self-defense and carries the cases back into the bedroom. As he gathers up the ones on the bed, he decides the best way to dispose of them will be to give them to Arthit and let the police destroy them. He feels slightly lighter as he relocks the safe.

Back in the living room, he realizes he wants to tell somebody about Hank’s possible breakthrough. Miaow is in school. Arthit is at work. Superman isn’t reachable, and Rafferty wouldn’t tell him anyway without the matter being resolved. That leaves the person he really wants to talk to, and he dials Rose’s cell number.

“Hello?” Her tone is brisk.

“How long has it been since I told you I love you?”

“Ah,” she says, a bit coolly. “What a nice surprise.”

“It is not. You’ve known it forever.”

“Yes. I suppose I have.”

“You’re a world I want to enter,” Rafferty says.

“And I’ll hold the door.”

“There’s something I want to tell you.”

“Something good?”

“I think so.”

Rose covers the mouthpiece of the phone and says something. Then she says, “Can it wait?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says. “You’re somewhere where you can’t talk.”

“Absolutely correct.”

“At Bangkok Domestics?”

“Actually,” she says, “I’m at Peachy and Rose’s Household Agency.”

“Peachy?”

“The canned kind, I think. By the way, your last conversation was extremely productive. Just a complete about-face. You may recall that there had been a certain prickliness.”

“On Peachy’s end.”

“Yes. Oh, and I remember having said something to you recently about keeping a cool heart. Well, a hot one works occasionally, too.”

“Peachy and Rose, huh? That has a nice ring.”

“And two more situations have been found for members of the labor pool. Turns out some people actually
prefer
attractive maids.”

“I know I would.”