For the Dead (34 page)

“Oh, God,” Rafferty says, and there are suddenly tears in his eyes. “I hope so.”

“Me, too.” She edges herself closer to him. “He or she?”

“He or she what? You mean, which do I want, or which do you think it is?”

“Which you want.”

“Oh, Rose,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s a zebra. I’m going to love it whatever it is.”

“I think I’d prefer a boy,” Rose says. She redirects his hand into a slow back-and-forth motion about six inches long. “Boys are important to families. They’re the tentpole.”

“You sound like Nguyen. The Asian sons syndrome.”

“If I’d had a couple of older brothers,” she says, “they would have been making money and my father probably wouldn’t have had to sell me.”

Rafferty says, “Ah.”

She stops his hand and pushes her stomach out. “Will you still love me when I have a huge belly?”

“I don’t know,” he says, blinking in the dark. “Will you still love
me
when I have a huge belly?”

She says, “Absolutely not,” and lifts her face to blow on the side of his neck.

And someone knocks on the door. “Mr. Rafferty? Mr.
Rafferty
?”

“Has to be Nguyen,” Poke says. “Not many people call me Mr. Rafferty.” He eases out of the bed and goes to the door, stark naked. Standing behind the door, he pulls it open a few inches and looks around the edge, but it’s not Nguyen. It’s Chinh.

“Sorry to bother you,” Chinh says, “but the older policeman—Thanom?”

“What about him?”

“He was on the way out of the embassy, going home, when his phone rang. It was a maid at his house. She said that six uniformed policemen had kicked the door in and were looking for him.”

Rafferty says, “I’ll be right there.”

He closes the door and says, “Looks like we haven’t got as much time as we thought.”

O
NLY ONE LIGHT
is on, but it’s bright enough for Rafferty to see Thanom sweat. He’s eating cookies without even looking at them, standing next to the food table. Nguyen, in a T-shirt, slacks, and white socks, is back at the coffee pot.

Rafferty says, “Arthit?”

“Coming back,” Nguyen says. “We got him on his cell.”

Thanom says, “They took my wife.”

“You said she’s from a good family,” Nguyen says. “They’ll let her go when you don’t show up for work tomorrow. They’re just holding everybody to keep them from tipping you off.”

“Where am I going to go?” Thanom looks down at the cookie in his hand and drops it onto the table as though it were red-hot.

“Nowhere.” Nguyen looks at Homer and flicks a finger at the coffeepot, and Homer trots over and picks it up. “You’ll stay here.”

Rafferty says, “How many people can you put up without causing a problem?”

“As many as I want,” Nguyen says. “I have a certain status here.”

Rafferty says, “I’ve been wondering about that.”

“Good,” Nguyen says. “It’ll give you something to do.” He calls something in Vietnamese after Homer. To Thanom, whose face had crumpled with suspicion at the sound of words he couldn’t understand, Nguyen says, “I told him to bring some tea, too.” He lifts both hands like a magician clearing his cuffs and says, “That’s all.”

There are voices in the hallway, and Arthit comes in. “Sooner than I thought,” he says to Rafferty.

“I was just saying the same thing. How early can you call your database cop?”

Arthit says, “Now. I offered her a job downtown, so she gave me her home phone so we could discuss it without everyone listening as I raid their talent.” He starts to punch up a number.

Nguyen says, “Wait. Write the number down and use my phone. Here, give me yours. All of you, turn off the cell phones. Pull out the batteries, if it’s even possible. We’ve got dozens of phones, all unregistered.” As Arthit goes into the hallway, Nguyen smiles at Thanom, not a very friendly smile. “The Thai government has big ears.”

“The man in that reflection,” Rafferty says. “He has to be close to Ton. I’m betting he’s related. He’s not going to trust anyone else. One thing on our side is that Ton’s family is still at the level where they get photographed for the newspapers. They haven’t quite made it into the stratosphere where no reporter would dare to point a camera at them. I’m going to spend the day at the Bangkok
Sun
, going through the social pages.”

“His family,” Nguyen says. “We need a chart of his family.”

“I can give you that,” Thanom says. “My wife—” He stops, staring at the center of the table. “My wife knows everything about those families. She’s—educated me.”

“Why don’t you make a list?” Nguyen says, and Rafferty is surprised at the gentleness in his voice. “I’ll get you some paper. Do a family tree. And tomorrow, you can call your wife and review it with her over the phone. And we’ll figure out where everybody is in the family’s businesses.” He looks at Rafferty as Arthit comes back in, phone extended to Nguyen. “That might tell us quite a bit.”

Arthit says, “She’ll be here at ten. Her name is Kwai, last name is Clemente. Her father’s a Filipino. And I just called home.”

At the word “home,” Rafferty remembers his question about
why Anna had been at Boo’s place, but he can’t think of any way to ask it. Arthit has picked up something, though, and his eyes come to Rafferty’s face.

“Was Anna at your house?” Rafferty says, just to ask something. “Everything okay?”

“No problem,” Arthit says. He turns to Nguyen. “Got room for one more?”

Nguyen says, “Does she prefer coffee or tea?”

F
OUR HOURS AFTER
he finally climbed into bed, Rafferty sleepily follows Rose to the meeting room where they’d first gathered, and finds Arthit, Anna, Thanom, and Andrew sitting around the table, silently eating breakfast. The embassy kitchen has put out Thai and Western food, plus bowls of steaming
pho
.

Eight places have been set, and at each of them, positioned beside the knife and spoon, is a generic cell phone and a shiny Ziploc bag.

Rose goes straight to Anna and starts talking as though she’s resuming a conversation that was interrupted only minutes ago. Anna keeps her eyes on Rose’s mouth. At the coffee pot, Rafferty takes advantage of the conversation to look for some evidence of nervousness in Anna, but she seems occupied in following the stream of Rose’s chatter. Thanom is eating rice with an egg broken on it, and the hand with the spoon is shaking so badly he’s scattered grains of rice all around the bowl and on the front of his uniform. He seems to have aged ten years overnight; he’s unshaven and his head trembles very slightly as he raises the spoon to his mouth.

Andrew continues to stare at the doorway after Rose and Rafferty have come in, and Rafferty says, “She’s asleep, Andrew. She’s not much on breakfast.” To Arthit, he says, “Look at this spread. Our host has some clout.”

“Optay eyespay,” Arthit says with his mouth full.

“Gesundheit.”

“He’s using Pig Latin,” Andrew says, just barely not curling his lip. “So I don’t know he’s calling my father the top spy in the embassy.”

“Is he really a spy?” Rafferty says. “That could come in handy.”

Arthit says, “Caught by a mere child.” He smiles. “You’re very impressive, Andrew.”

Andrew says, “Me, impressive? I’m a jerk,” and then he gets up and stalks out of the room. His napkin clings to his jeans until he’s at the door, and since Rafferty’s standing, he goes after the boy and picks it up.

“He is kind of a jerk,” Rafferty says, refolding the napkin without knowing he’s doing it. “Or at least, he was last night, at Boo’s place.”

Thanom says, “We—we need to get started. We need to do something.”

“Kwai will be here in an hour,” Arthit says.

“And we have a room set up for her.” Nguyen comes in, wearing a dark, beautifully tailored suit. He looks like he slept ten hours. “After what you told us last night, I gave her a window.”

“She’ll like that,” Arthit says.

“Colonel Thanom, your wife is still with the police, but they’ve begun to release the servants, so it shouldn’t be long. Unless they hold her to threaten you.”

Thanom spills some rice, and he glares down at it and then releases an enormous sigh.

“I don’t think they will,” Nguyen says, watching him. “Not with her family background. What else, what else? Oh. Each of you should take the phone next to your silverware, and that’s the only one you can use. If you need to download phone numbers or other data from your own phone, let Homer or Chinh know, and they’ll take you into a shielded room, where the signal can’t be detected. Otherwise, please put your own phone into the Ziploc bag and
drop the whole thing into the basket on the table. The police already know most of you are here, but let’s not keep notifying them.”

Thanom says, “But what if someone calls us? There could be important calls from—from—”

“Every ninety minutes or so, one of our drivers will take the basket out in the car. A few miles away, he’ll stop and power one on, check for incoming, turn it off again, and drive a few more miles, doing them one at a time until he’s got them all. Then he’ll use his own phone to call whoever got a message.”

Rafferty says, “You’ve done this before.”

Arthit says, “How do you know that the cops know where we are?”

“It’s obvious that my family would come here,” Nguyen says. “And almost all of you have your phones, which are signaling away. But mostly, I know because we’ve got four in plainclothes watching the embassy.”

Rafferty says, “Well, hell.”

“It’s more psychological than anything else. They can’t come onto the grounds, and they’d be risking an incident if they stopped and searched an official embassy vehicle, so that’s what you’ll go in and out in, when you have to go in and out. And they probably don’t know we’ve spotted them, which is an edge. Perhaps the two of you,” he says to Arthit and Thanom, “would like to look at them on video, see whether you know any of them, whether you can figure out who might have sent them. And Mr. Rafferty, could you please come with me? We need to talk for a minute.”

“Sure. You want some coffee?”

“Oh, why not. Black.” Nguyen turns toward the door and waits for Rafferty. As he takes the cup, he says to Thanom, “Don’t worry too much. This is going to be a very full day.”

R
AFFERTY TRAILS
N
GUYEN
as they track down one hall and then another, leading into an area of the embassy Rafferty hasn’t
seen yet. It’s obviously for the top echelon and their visitors: the carpets are thicker and paintings line the halls. Outside a dark, heavily grained double door, Nguyen stops and turns. “You want to get out of here today, right? To go see your reporter friend at the
Sun
?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. Let’s get the cops really worked up. You and I will go out in an embassy limousine, complete with the flag flying on the fender, with Chinh driving. They’d be apprehensive just to see you go into a newspaper office, but we’ll crank it up. We have an early lunch reservation in a very nice restaurant, at a window table, with the paper’s business editor. My official title here is business liaison, so I know him quite well.”

“You and me and the business editor. That’ll be an acid reflux moment for Ton.”

“Then we’ll walk in plain view, with Chinh and my bodyguard, Tuan, flanking us, straight to the newspaper. I’ll go into the building with you and do some work of my own while you go through the pictures.”

“It could take hours.”

“The longer the better. Gives them more to worry about.” He surveys Rafferty’s jeans and T-shirt and shakes his head. “I guess you have your own inimitable style. But stand up straight, okay?”

Rafferty sips his coffee and says, “Do I slouch?” but Nguyen is already opening the door.

They enter an anteroom with carpets of a regal red on which floats a wide teak desk that’s been claimed by a fearfully groomed Vietnamese woman in her mid-thirties. She smiles at Nguyen, glances at Poke, then says to Nguyen, “Go right in. He’s expecting you.”

Rafferty snags Nguyen’s arm. “He who?”

“Secretary Tran.” Nguyen puts his cup on the desk, and the woman immediately opens a drawer and puts a frilly white coaster beneath Nguyen’s coffee and another beside it for Poke. “He’s the
ambassador’s executive assistant, and for the purposes of this meeting he
is
the ambassador.”

“Got it.” Poke drains the cup and puts it on the coaster. The woman re-centers it.

Nguyen takes one last regretful look at Rafferty, sighs, and goes through the door, with Rafferty trailing along like a chastened Labrador Retriever. The room into which Nguyen leads him has the kind of volume that’s meant to impress. Thick midnight-blue carpets match heavy woven drapes, and vermilion walls rise at least fourteen feet to culminate in a ceiling of dark, highly polished hardwood. Pinspots set into the ceiling pick out gilt-framed watercolors, impressionistic views of scenery that Rafferty supposes is Vietnam.

The desk is half the size of Rafferty’s kitchen. Standing behind it, all ten of his widespread fingertips touching its surface as though Nguyen and Rafferty had caught him at the apogee of a pushup, is a thin, very sleek man in his fifties with a steel-gray military brush-cut, cheekbones that jut like elbows and tight, dry eyes that announce an unwillingness to be entertained. There’s almost no upper lip, but the lower plumps out like a bumper, and for a second Rafferty thinks it’s expressing disapproval of his clothing.

But then the man smiles, just a tug at the corners of his mouth, and the lower lip stays out there. He says, “Captain. Mr. Rafferty.”

Nguyen says, “Sir.”

“Your Colonel Thanom,” Tran says without any warm-up. “How bad is he?”

Rafferty waits a beat to give Nguyen a chance, but when it’s clear that the question is meant for him, he says, “Pretty bad.”

“Is he—was he—involved in the murder ring?”

Rafferty says, “Sure, he was.” Tran’s eyes dart to Nguyen just long enough to cause frostbite, and then resettle on Rafferty, who picks up the thread. “Sawat’s operation took a lot of cooperation. Cops had to be evaluated in advance to make sure they’d play.
They had to be pulled from duty to free them up for the hit. Time cards showing they were on their regular assignments had to be forged and entered into the system. Other cops had to be brought in to cover for the cops who were otherwise employed, et cetera. On and on. And, of course, all those secrets had to be kept, so money flowed. Thanom was Sawat’s immediate superior, and there’s no way he wasn’t on the pad.”