For the Dead (28 page)

Someone with a knife. Someone who meant to use it.

He’s rubbed his finger on the wet side of his glass, and he’s drawing question marks on the table. If it’s not the pictures, what?

The cops have the pictures now
. There are cops involved in all of this—Sawat’s racket had to involve several highly-ranked officers. Arthit’s boss, Thanom, is the most probable link to Sawat, but he’s also the one who knows best that Miaow doesn’t have the phone. So why would he send that man after Miaow?

It suddenly occurs to him that the man with the knife must have picked Miaow up at the apartment. Reflexively, he calls home and tells Rose that no one, not even Anand, is leaving the building until he, Rafferty, is back.

He’s on his feet without even knowing he got up, standing next to the plate glass window and looking out at the heat of the day.
Andrew
, he thinks. Andrew had the phone overnight at his apartment. Maybe there’s something
else
on it, something worth killing a child for. Maybe Andrew saw something without knowing it.

Thirty minutes left. He’ll walk to Nguyen’s office. That’ll use up at least twenty.

The heat slaps him in the face as he steps outside, but it doesn’t sap the coil of uneasy energy at his core. As livid as he is about the threat to Miaow, there’s a new level of anxiety that’s all about Rose’s pregnancy. He hadn’t thought in the past that the idea of something happening to her could be any more agonizing than it already was, but this is in a whole new language.

There are days when Bangkok strikes him as the world’s biggest juicer, a giant, malevolent machine devised solely to extract perspiration from the defenseless. He’s dragging his feet to stretch out the walk, and still he’s practically squirting sweat as he approaches the high steel gate of the Vietnamese Embassy and heads for the closed door with the urgent-looking red sign on it. As he reaches out to open it, his phone rings: same number as before.

“Hello?”

“This is Nguyen. Where are you?”

“About to knock on the door or whatever the protocol is here.”

“I’m not there,” Nguyen says. He sounds agitated, more rattled that Rafferty can recall his being. “I’m at home. Something has happened. Please come here.”

“Your apartment.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Please come now.”

Nguyen disconnects. Rafferty glares at the phone for a moment and then turns back into the heat of the day.

T
HE LAST TIME
Rafferty visited this apartment, his impression was one of precise control, an architectural equivalent to the way Nguyen oils his hair to paste every strand in place. The symmetry of the apartment—too rigid, too precious—made it feel like a diorama under glass.

Now it looks like the entire place was picked up, turned sideways, and given a good shake.

He pauses in the entrance to the living room, where the two blue couches are upside-down, their cushions slit and the stuffing scattered. Nguyen had greeted him at the door with a tight nod and then turned, leaving Rafferty to follow him inside. Over Nguyen’s shoulders, two compact, fit-looking men give him challenging stares until he looks elsewhere.

One of them is short and broad-shouldered, with rapidly receding hair above a Pleistocene brow-ridge. The other is whippet-thin, with lips so narrow they look like they could draw blood. They both wear slacks and polo shirts and they put no visible energy into exuding charm.

“These are Chinh and Homer,” Nguyen says without indicating which is which. “You have a policeman at your place. Can you trust him?”

“He’s a friend. How do you know that I have—”

“I called. It was the first thing I did when I came home and saw
this.” Nguyen kicks some glistening white stuff, like the angel’s-hair they used to put on Christmas trees, probably an element in the couch’s stuffing. It drifts about a foot into the air and waffles down. “You called me to tell me someone chased Miaow with a knife,” he says, “because you were concerned about Andrew. I called your apartment because I wanted to tell Mrs. Rafferty and Miaow that they might think of going somewhere else.”

“Thank you.”

Nguyen gives him a brusque nod and watches as the other two men straighten the room, looking under and into everything they touch. “I’ve noticed that you feel most comfortable when you think you’re in charge,” Nguyen says, turning to him. Rafferty searches for a hint of humor in the man’s eyes but finds none. His face is stony with fury. “Would you like to ask questions, or should I just tell you about this?”

“Tell me.”

“We’ll sit at the table,” Nguyen says, not bothering to make it sound like an invitation. A round table stands at the corner of the floor-to-ceiling windows that wall half of the living room. Beside it are four carved wooden chairs whose blue silk-covered seats have been sliced open. This was where Rafferty sat the first time he came here, eight or nine weeks ago, asking Nguyen to side with him in a war with a former American operative who had done a lot of damage in Vietnam. Nguyen had remained neutral.

Nguyen chooses a chair with its back touching the window while Rafferty, who’s never been happy with heights, takes the one farthest away. Nguyen begins to talk even before Rafferty is seated. “My wife, as you know, has been ill for a long time. I tell you this again because it is related to what happened here this morning. Anh Duong—Andrew—and I took her to her doctor this morning at ten. That’s the only time this apartment has been empty since we took her to that same doctor four weeks ago. It’s a monthly appointment.”

Rafferty says, “Maybe they were watching.”

A sideways tilt of the head that’s clearly not intended to express agreement. “Maybe. But I doubt it. I doubt it because the doormen say they saw nothing while we were gone. No one, they say, came in and went up to this floor. And the video surveillance disks are missing.”

Rafferty says, “Ahhh, shit.”

One of the hard-eyed guys makes a sound like a stopped-up snort.

“Chinh, Homer,” Nguyen says. “Go finish in Anh Duong’s room.” He’s speaking English, probably for Rafferty’s sake.

When they’ve left, Rafferty says, “Homer?”

“His mother is a Classics scholar. He has a brother named Virgil.”

“Okay,” Rafferty says. “Only cops could operate with this kind of impunity. Scare your doormen into calling them when you leave, walk away with the video. Is the appointment always the same day?”

“First Monday of every month.”

“And you were gone—?”

“A little more than two and a half hours. Plenty of time for this kind of search. If they’d wanted to be subtle it might have taken longer.”

“But they didn’t care whether they were subtle.”

“No, they didn’t,” Nguyen says tightly. “And that was one of their mistakes.”

“One?”

“The other was to chase Miaow with a knife. Destroying this apartment tells me they don’t think they can be touched. Taking a knife to your daughter tells me that they would kill my son, too. And before we go any further, I want to say something personal. It’s clear to me now that Miaow saved Andrew’s life.” He’s sitting bolt upright in the shredded chair, his knees apart, and now he dips his head slightly. “I owe your daughter my thanks.”

“I’ll pass them along.”

“I’ll tell her myself. If you’ll do what I suggest, I’ll have lots of opportunity.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m moving Andrew and his mother into the embassy. Immediately. We would be honored to host Mrs. Rafferty and Miaow, too.”

Rafferty is taken so off-guard it takes him a moment to make sense of it. He says, “The embassy,” and then he laughs.

Nguyen doesn’t laugh, but he looks like he remembers having laughed once, which is as close as Rafferty has seen him get. “Exactly,” he says. “The Embassy is Vietnam. The Thai police have no jurisdiction there. They can wipe themselves on their badges.”

“It’s perfect.”

Nguyen says, “It’s going to throw Andrew and Miaow together.”

“They’ll both survive.”

“It
is
important to me, Mr. Rafferty, that my son marries a Vietnamese girl.”

“Mr. Nguyen—”

“Captain. Captain Nguyen.”

“Sorry.
Captain
Nguyen. And it’s important to me that my daughter falls in love with someone who deserves her.”

Nguyen’s mouth tightens.

“Nothing personal,” Rafferty says, “not any more than the way you feel about Miaow is personal.”

“We have responsibilities,” Nguyen says, “filial and family responsibilities. As an only son, Andrew’s is to honor his family. To do that, he’ll have to marry a Vietnamese girl. This is something he needs to learn now, while he still does what he’s told.”

“You may be right,” Rafferty says, making no effort to sound like he means it. “He’s your kid. But I’ll tell you what. The cops made
three
mistakes. The third one was pulling this shit in the week my wife discovered she’s pregnant.”

Whatever Nguyen is going to say, he bites it back when one of the hard-eyed men, Homer or Chinh, comes back in, followed by Andrew, who gives Rafferty a double-take and says, “Hello, Mr. Rafferty.”

“Hey, Andrew. How you handling this?”

“I don’t know. What’s my choice? Is Miaow all right?”

“She’s fine. She’s got a cop—one of the good ones—babysitting her right now.”

“Nothing more,” Chinh or Homer says, and the other one comes in, too.

“There
isn’t
anything more,” Andrew says with a kind of condensed bitterness. “They got everything.”

“Everything what?” Rafferty asks.

“Every computer and peripheral in the apartment,” Nguyen says. “Mine, too, which is causing some excitement at the embassy.”

“But it’s Andrew’s they were after,” Rafferty says.

“Of course,” Nguyen says. “They took everything he could conceivably have used to copy or store the information from that phone.”

“All of it?” Rafferty says.

“All of it,” Nguyen says.

“Andrew,” Rafferty says. “Did they get all of it?”

Something glimmers in Andrew’s eye, and then it’s gone. He says, “Not unless they closed down Google.”

His father says, “Google?”

“On the way home from buying the phone,” Andrew says, his eyes watching for his father’s reaction, “while Miaow was being carsick, I emailed everything to myself.”

T
HANOM PUTS THE
phone down and sees that the handset is smeared with his sweat.

He feels as though the back wall of his office, three stories in the air, has just collapsed, and two of the legs of his chair are dangling twenty meters above the street. His life is over.

He suddenly remembers the twinge of guilt he’d felt about implicating Arthit, and a hot wave of shame rises up to choke him. Not Arthit, he thinks.
Him
.

It’s been him all along.

For years, they’ve been working on this. This is a ten-year plan, one the Chinese government would envy. It must have been put into place practically the day he received the promotion that put him in charge of Sawat.

Oh, no
, he thinks. The promotion. The high point of his career. The only time his wife ever expressed any pride in him. For her, the marriage had been one long decline into unbroken disappointment until he was promoted. She had said, “Isn’t this a nice surprise?” He hadn’t told her exactly how surprised he was.

There had been two men between him and the desk at which he now sits, two people who were more likely choices than he, who could have argued that they were more deserving than he, who could have made a fuss, in fact, about the chain of command. And hadn’t.

Both of them have done very nicely for themselves, he realizes, both of them have moved up and sideways, like the knight in chess. Like a piece of choreography.

And he’d been so complacent, so smug, so secure that his worth had been recognized and rewarded at long last. His career, which had begun slowly, had finally gotten the traction he deserved. His superiors had recognized him for what he was.

A fall guy.

The bank account had been opened about a month after he was promoted. Sawat was already active by then. The deposits had been cashier’s checks and money orders, sometimes cash. They had been deposited by someone whose identification proclaimed him to be a police captain named Sawat.

There had even been occasional withdrawals, made by someone using his, Thanom’s, name, just for verisimilitude.

It was so nicely designed, such a tight fit, he could almost respect it.

The person who made the deposits was in police uniform, unlikely to have been scrutinized by a low-ranking bank employee. There was some possibility, Arundee had acknowledged, in
response to Thanom’s frantic demand, that at some point the identification of the person who made the withdrawals might have been scanned and copied, but probably not. He was, after all, a police officer, and the police …

But he would look to see whether anything was there.

Hooked and landed
, Thanom thinks. All they need to do is cook him, and they can do that any time they get hungry.

The Dancer. He knows some people in the department call him the Dancer. He’d taken a kind of pride in it, but that was when he thought he’d been leading. Now that he knows different, now that he knows he’s been maneuvered, one graceful step at a time, to the edge of a cliff, he feels the lack of affection the nickname implies. He has no allies.

There must be
someone
he can trust. There must be someone with whom he can discuss this. There must be someone who can—

His mind stops, absolutely blank, until he can finish the thought. There must be someone who can
help
.

He jumps two inches straight up as the comm box on his desk buzzes. He pushes the button, and Taan says, “On line one, sir. It’s Lieutenant-Colonel Arthit.”

“I
CLEARED THE
browser on the phone,” Andrew says. “Right after I sent the pictures to myself.” He’s sitting at the keyboard in an Internet cafe, and his father, Rafferty, Homer, and Chinh are gathered around him as though he were about to do a trick, which, Rafferty thinks, isn’t completely inaccurate.