A Nail Through the Heart (5 page)

“Promise,” Rafferty says, but Arthit is looking past him.

Rafferty turns to see Superman glowering at them from the door to the hallway. He is shining clean, his gleaming straight black hair falling below his shoulders. Except for the one swollen eye, Rafferty would not have recognized him. He glances sharply at Arthit, and his nostrils flare as he smells cop. Just as quickly, his eyes skitter away toward the balcony.

Miaow takes one look at him and bursts into tears.

The boy drills her with a glare and crosses the room toward her, his posture rigid. If he had spines, Rafferty thinks, they would be bristling. But Rose was right; he
is
handsome, even though the new blue clothes hang on him in folds. He steps out onto the balcony, and Miaow straightens without rising. He sits beside her, only inches
away. Miaow wipes her face fiercely with a palm and resumes poking at the fire. The two of them sit identically, knees up and narrow backs curved, with six inches of air between them. To Rafferty’s eyes, something about the effortless way they share the space suggests an old married couple.

“I know that kid from somewhere,” Arthit says. He’s wearing his policeman’s face.

On the balcony Miaow curls herself against him as though he were much larger than she and she could shelter herself beneath his arm. Rose watches them gravely, doing emotional arithmetic in her head. Whatever the answer might be, Rafferty knows he has no chance of reaching it on his own. It’s a calculus he hasn’t mastered.

Arthit touches his arm. “Call Clarissa tomorrow,” he says again. Then he turns to study the boy.

“HE’S FINE WHEN
he’s with me,” Rose says in Thai. They are sitting in the living room, surrounded by the ruins of a dinner that even Rafferty, who cooked it, has to admit was appalling. The children had sat shoulder to shoulder on the balcony, talking in whispers while Rose carried on a bright stream of chatter, not one word of which Rafferty remembers. When everyone reached a consensus that the endless evening could be abandoned, Superman retreated into Miaow’s room without even saying good night.

“He
bit
you,” Rafferty reminds her.

“Only once. He was just keeping in practice.” Rose rummages through her enormous leather handbag for the ever-present Marlboro Lights. She pulls out a fresh pack of the local bootlegs, complete with its oversize black death’s-head, and uses a disposable plastic lighter to burn off the cellophane at one corner of the pack. Then she worries a tiny hole in the foil and taps out a single cigarette. It is an extremely labor-intensive process.

Rafferty watches the routine for the thousandth time. “Half the Thai women I know open cigarettes that way,” he says, “and I’ve never been able to figure out why.”

“When you arrived here, you smoked,” Rose reminds him, lighting up.

“I actually recall things that far back, Rose,” he says. “It’s the short-term memory that’s going.”

“And when you went into a bar, you put the pack on the table in front of you, wide open the American way, with a great big hole in it. What happened then?”

“Women hit me up for cigarettes,” Rafferty says.

“Every girl in the bar. Even the ones who didn’t smoke. It’s all part of getting as much as possible from the
farang.
That’s what that whole life is about.”

“But the way you open them—”

“It just makes it harder for people to take them away from me,” she says. “These things cost money.”

Money is a sore subject with Rose, whose earnings took a vertical nosedive when she quit dancing go-go and went into cleaning apartments. Now she is trying to start a cleaning business, recruiting women from the bars who are either too old to attract customers or just want out of the life. It’s slow going. The women may want to quit the bars, but for years most of them have never washed anything but their hair. Even with occasional help from Rafferty—he put up eight hundred dollars, one-fifth of his savings account, for 20 percent of the business—Rose has intermittent bouts of despair.

“So the boy only bit you once,” Rafferty says, changing the subject. “I suppose that’s encouraging.”

“It’s not women he has a problem with.” She blows a funnel of smoke with enormous satisfaction.

“Who
knows
who he has a problem with? Given that he’s probably killed somebody and he’s alone with Miaow in her room right now.”

“They’re friends,” Rose says soothingly. “You think too much.”

“The inevitable Thai response. My daughter’s shut up in a room with an incipient homicidal maniac who’s got an aura like a forest fire, and you tell me I think too much.”

“Miaow is tough,” Rose says. “She got along without you for
years, and now you’re right here in the next room with your ears pointing up like a guard dog. Just sit back and relax.”

“Did he say anything at all to you?”

“It seems to me,” Rose says, folding her long legs under her, “that the one who owes you an explanation is Miaow.”

“Later,” Rafferty says. “That’s what she said: ‘Later.’”

“It’s later now,” Rose points out.

“It sure as hell is,” Rafferty says, getting up.

Rose gazes up at him in mock adoration and bats her eyelashes, which are lush enough to kick up a breeze. “You’re so masterful.”

“I really don’t know what I’d do, Rose,” Rafferty says, “without you on hand to supply the play-by-play.”

“The what-by-what?”

“American expression.” He crosses the room. “Play-by-play. It refers to one big, slow, dumb guy and one little, fast, dumb guy who tell you what’s going on at sporting events.”

She lifts a hand to slow his exit. “While you’re feeling so chatty, what did Arthit want?”

“He wants to owe me a favor. There’s an Australian woman who’s lost an uncle here in Thailand.”

Rose taps the cigarette once, and the ash falls dead center in the ashtray. “Is she a blonde?”

“She’s a blonde in the same way Miaow’s a child. Do I hear an undercurrent of jealousy?”

“Thai women don’t trust their men with blondes.”

“I’m
your man
,” Rafferty says. “That sounds nice.”

“Don’t change the subject. You were going into Miaow’s room, remember? I’ll clean up,” Rose says, doing a languid rise from the couch, “while you lay down the law.”

The Crayola frowny face is hanging on the doorknob of Miaow’s room, usually a sign that entry is strictly forbidden. She designed both it and its counterpart, the smiley face that means “Come right in,” shortly after moving into the room that had been Rafferty’s office. Rafferty pauses at the door, listens and hears nothing, and then knocks softly.

He waits a moment, opens the door a few inches, and peeks in. Miaow sits on the lower bunk with Superman’s head in her lap. He is fast asleep. One arm dangles down to the carpet in graceful, tapering planes. It looks like Michelangelo’s
Pietà
would look if the
Pietà
depicted two small brown children.

Miaow gazes up at him as though from a great distance. Her eyes are shining with happiness. They seem to look through him. Very slowly, she lifts a hand from the boy’s head and places an upraised finger to her lips. “Shhhhh,” she whispers, more a breath than anything else.

T
he man who called himself Chon sits alone at a table. The open-air restaurant is dim and deserted. His shiny new watch—bought to help him track time on the night he and Tam dug up the safe—says 3:48
A.M.
, and even Bangkok slows down to catch its breath at that hour. The single waitress is asleep on a chair, and he sees no reason to wake her. He isn’t hungry. He just needs a smooth, horizontal surface for half an hour or so.

A pad of blue-lined paper lies open in front of him, and a clutch of cheap ballpoint pens bristles from his pocket. He had been worried that he would write so many drafts that his pen would run out of ink, so he went to two stores, buying the pens in one and the paper in the other, at the busiest time of day. A black three-ring notebook sits beside the paper.

In the end, though, the note has proved very simple to write. He has copied it twice to make sure it is legible, because his nervousness makes his hand shake. Even writing her a letter frightens him.

Or perhaps he is just tired. He has not slept in the same room
twice since the night of the buried safe. For the first few days, he stayed in the Chinatown district, but the noise in the narrow streets made it impossible for him to sleep, not that he sleeps well even when it is quiet. He has not slept well for almost twenty years. Now he makes his futile grabs at sleep in firetrap fifty-baht flophouses, one more anonymous pauper.

Other than a thin sheaf of Thai money, he carries nothing but the pens, the paper, and the notebook. If he is killed, as he almost certainly will be, there will be nothing to say who he was. Just as well, he thinks, because he is not anyone anymore.

What is left of his life, his reason for being alive, is in that notebook.

He regrets having shot Tam. If the man hadn’t looked at the photos, he’d be alive now. Once he saw them, though, he couldn’t be allowed to live. He might have tried to play the angles. He might have gone to
her
.

Still, Chon has relived many times the moment when the gun coughed in his grip and Tam dropped into the water, one hand uplifted for help. The hand haunts Chon. Although he has seen thousands of deaths, although he is saturated with death and can sometimes smell death on his skin, he has never killed before and never thought he would.

If a fortune-teller had told him twenty-five years ago—when he had a home, a wife, children, a violin, and two good hands—that he would now be planning the total destruction of another human being, he would have laughed out loud. But he couldn’t have known then that there would come a time when destroying someone would be all he had in the world.

He knows who he is now, but he has no idea what has become of the man he was. It seems to him that man is dead and he is the ghost that remains.

From the notebook he takes a copy of one of the photos from the safe. He puts it behind the letter and aligns them, tapping the edges on the tabletop. He realizes he has forgotten to buy a stapler. Unbidden, the thought washes over him:
What else have I forgotten?

Contemplating the next part of his plan, he breaks into a sweat even in the cool evening air. He will have to get close to her at least once. It will be very difficult for him to force himself to be anywhere near her. She is terror itself to him.

But he had believed the letter would be hard to write, and it was easy. Maybe the rest of it will be easy, too. It will have to be.

In ten days, by the twenty-sixth of the month, either she or he will be dead.

He looks down at the note one last time. It says, in Khmer,
“I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.”

H
e awakes to the familiar gloom. The bedroom’s only window is blocked by an asthmatic air conditioner that drowns out the noise of the Bangkok streets eight stories down, as though to compensate for its failure to cool the room. Four or five beams of light penetrate the ragged seal around the air con and pick out objects at random, like bad stage lighting: his shoes on the floor, a paperback of Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
splayed open and facedown, the towel Rose folded at the foot of the bed when she came in from her inevitable bedtime shower, the shower every bar girl takes before slipping between the sheets to go to work. His efforts to convince her that he actually prefers her own taste to that of soap have not been successful. In her mind, the bar may be behind her, but the body retains its habits.

So: the towel, the book, the shoes. A harmonica Miaow briefly tortured them with, discarded now, that somehow crawled out of the closet under its own power. Pieces of the life he has made here. A life,
he thinks, that could shatter into its component pieces as quickly and senselessly as the lives broken by the great waves.

Midway through his first stretch of the morning, he remembers the boy, and his stomach involuntarily contracts.

And then he puts out a hand and realizes that Rose is not beside him.

Wrapping himself in the ersatz-silk robe Miaow bought him for his birthday, an unsettling pink the color of healthy gums and adorned on the back with a fey dragon lisping fire, he pads into the empty living room and then the empty kitchen. Morning light slants into the room, throwing the remains of their dinner into unappetizing relief. No Rose: an early-morning start for the new businesswoman. Trying unsuccessfully to smooth his hair, he goes down the hall to Miaow’s room.

The children are seated on the pink rug he bought Miaow when she moved in. The boy averts his face the instant Rafferty looks in. Miaow is rebraiding his hair with such intensity of purpose that she does not even turn at the sound of the opening door. Eight or ten brightly colored rubber bands circle her wrists, and several others are already wrapped around the ends of the boy’s new braids, a style that owes something to Snoop Dogg and Thai MTV. Rafferty thinks briefly about Having Their Talk and then looks at his watch: almost ten. He has promised to call Clarissa Ulrich. But before he can do much of anything, he needs coffee.

He has caffeinated, showered, dressed, and set his appointment with Clarissa when the door opens and Rose comes in. As always, when he first sees her each day, he feels the same jolt of electricity that straightened his spine when she stepped onto the stage at the King’s Castle bar the evening they met. Then she had worn a black bikini and a badge with her number on it, the number customers used to buy her drinks or order her for the night. Today she wears jeans and a carefully ironed T-shirt. Plastic shopping bags hang from her arms where the gold bracelets—now long sold—used to be. One bag is full to overflowing with shoes.

He toasts her with his third cup of coffee. “If those are for me, I generally wear higher heels.”

“So do I.” She drops the bag where she stands. It must be a scorcher outside, because her upper lip is damp, Rose’s reaction to weather that would melt most people where they stood. “I’ve got two maid interviews today. My girls have promised to do their job, which is to dress down and not plaster on the makeup. My job is not to tower over the women who want housekeepers.”

Rose has been trying to build her business for several months now, and she has learned the hard way that most women, especially married women, aren’t eager to hire someone who looks like she earned an advanced degree at Pussy Galore. Some of her corps of former flowers are still beautiful, while others are well past the point at which they would be assigned to dance at the front of the bar, visible from the street. By and large they are not convincing housemaids. Something of that other world clings to them, some kind of glimmer that can’t be washed off like makeup or hidden beneath baggy clothes. More than anything else, it’s a physical attitude. People who have danced naked in front of hundreds of strangers present themselves differently.

“You shopped yesterday,” he says, looking at the bags.

“Seems like a week ago.” Rose blows upward at her damp bangs. “These are the things I’m going to need for the next few days.”

“You’re going to stay here?” A basic plank of Rose’s declaration of independence is her reluctance to spend more than one night at a time in Rafferty’s apartment. Most nights she sleeps in a sweltering ten-foot-by-ten-foot concrete box near Convent Road, splitting the rent with two women who once danced with her at the King’s Castle.

“You have to go running around for Arthit, storing up favors,” she says. “We’ve got a guest. I thought you could use the help.” She bends down and rummages through the bags while Rafferty tries to think of some way to express his gratitude that won’t embarrass her. “This blond woman,” Rose says, both hands in one of the bags. “Is she pretty?”

“Not particularly.”

“Would she, as you say, turn heads?”

“Only on very loose necks.”

She straightens up with a brush in her hand. “Then do something about your hair,” she says. “No point in frightening the poor thing.”

“WE TALKED ONCE
a week for fifteen years,” Clarissa Ulrich says without moving her lower jaw. Her lips work fine, but her teeth might as well be wired together. Tension creates vertical bands down the sides of her neck. “It’s been more than two months since I heard from him.”

If Rose had seen this woman, Rafferty thinks, she would have combed his hair herself. Clarissa Ulrich is no threat. A long peninsula of sweat extends down the front of her blouse, and her pale, flyaway hair catches the rosy light from the window of the coffee shop, creating the pinkish aura of an igniting match. She is clearly not enjoying Bangkok’s climate. She has the look he has come to recognize on
farang
who are new to Bangkok, a steely conviction that life will go on if they can only survive the next five minutes. And Hofstedler is right: She reeks of angst, both metaphorically and physically. He smells sweat, cigarettes, and fear.

“Have there been lapses before?” He blows on his coffee, keeping his eyes on his notebook. She is uncomfortable being looked at.

She folds her hands in her lap like a child being reprimanded. Her plumpness is watery and unhealthy-looking, as if a finger pressed into her cheek would leave a dimple. The front of her blouse sags beneath a wilted silk flower that strikes him as the most metaphorical fashion statement he has ever seen.

“We’ve never missed a talk.” She lifts her cup. Her nails are bitten to the quick, the cuticles ragged as torn paper. “We’re much closer than most uncles and nieces.” She sips the coffee and winces at the burn. “My parents,” she says, as though he has asked a question. “They’re both surgeons. They never had much time for…um, anything but their work. Everything was life and death except, you know, actual life. Everything was a distraction.”

“Everything.” He writes
“surgeons,”
mostly to keep his gaze off her.

“Well, I was
certainly
a distraction.” She wraps her damaged
fingers around the cup, although he knows it must be burning her. “I was a…a piece of furniture they hadn’t ordered, something they stumbled over in the dark. My mother told me as much. ‘You know, dear,’ she said, ‘you weren’t planned. You were Mommy’s little surprise.’” She registers the heat in her hands, puts the cup down, and blows into her palms. “So Uncle Claus stepped in.”

Rafferty suddenly recognizes the bitterness in her eyes. He has seen it in Miaow’s. “He took care of you.”

“He took me in. It started with visits when my parents were on vacation, and the visits got longer until finally I was living at his house. Nobody ever said much of anything, but when I went home one day, my mother had rearranged my room. I always slept under the window, because light came through it and I was afraid of the dark. My mother had pushed the bed against the wall. ‘It looks much bigger this way,’ she said. I was fourteen, and I said, ‘It looks bigger because I’m not in it.’” A strangled laugh, rocks rattling in a can. “So I went back home. To Uncle Claus.”

“Okay, so you’re living with Uncle Claus. What took him to Bangkok?”

“He worked in oil in Saudi Arabia when he was young. He’d work there a few months and then spend a month here, decompressing, he said. He loved it here. When I went to college, he came to stay.”

Rafferty hesitates for a moment, but he has to ask the question. “People usually stay in Bangkok for a reason. What was your uncle’s reason?”

“I just told you. He loves it.”

Not very specific, he thinks. “And what did he do here?”

“What
does
he do here, you mean.” Her eyes roam the room, taking in the clientele, mostly affluent young Thais wearing designer clothes, some of them in the head-to-toe black of the world’s terminally hip, although until recently Thais associated black primarily with funerals. “He helps out. He works with groups that do volunteer work with the homeless, especially kids. That’s why that nice policeman thought you’d want to help, because of your little girl.”

Thanks, Arthit.
“Groups that work with kids,”
he writes. “Okay,
so before he stopped calling. Did anything seem different? Did he talk about anything new?”

She studies the tabletop for a moment, then wipes her side of it with a napkin. “There was a maid. He hired her not too long ago. His calls were full of her. Doughnut was her name. Doughnut this, Doughnut that. He was crazy about her.”

“There can’t be that many girls named Doughnut.” He doesn’t even bother to write it down.

“I sort of hope not,” Clarissa says. “But it’s funny, because she hasn’t answered the phone in his apartment since his calls stopped. She always answered before.”

Doughnut,
Rafferty thinks. “Two months ago the waves hit. Do you think there’s any chance he went down to the coast?”

“That’s what everybody asks. No. Uncle Claus is enormous. Not the bathing-suit type. And he burns in five minutes. I can’t imagine why he’d go down there.”

Rafferty can think of several possible reasons, all of them in the raunchier areas of Patong Beach on Phuket. “I’ll check anyway. Have you been to his apartment?”

“I don’t have a key.”

She has turned to stare out the window and into the glare of the day, as though she hopes she will see her uncle stroll by.

“Somehow,” Rafferty says, “I don’t think that will be a problem.”