For the Dead (39 page)

He knows how sensitive Anna is about the way she sounds when she speaks, and here she is, doing it in front of a room full of people.

Her eyes are shining, her face transparent with happiness. “Chalee and Dok and Treasure already know
Khun
Poke,” she says to the children, speaking the words as she signs them. “
Khun
Poke is a famous writer. One day he’ll come back and talk to you all about writing. We all need to read and write well, isn’t that true,
Khun
Poke?”

Children turn to look to him, so intently it makes his ears ring, and he says, “Absolutely.”

Anna signs his answer and asks, “And why is that?”

“For—uhhh—joy?” he says. Feeling foolish, he smiles and points to the corners of his mouth. “And, and having a better life and even making money.”

“
Khun
Poke and his wife,” Anna says, “adopted a daughter from the street, and now she goes to a good school and when she’s grown up she’ll be able to be anything she wants, isn’t that right?”

“Anything,” Poke says, and his voice is unexpectedly fierce in his ears.

“Because she’s learned to
read
and
write
,” Anna says, signing away. “And you,
all
of you, can do the same. Remember, each and every one of you: you don’t have to live in the street. You can be whatever you want. You can have whatever you want.”

Dok says, “Can I have a computer?”

“You can have two of them, if you work hard enough. Chalee?”

Chalee sits up, startled.

“Can you pass out some of your paper? Does everyone have a
pencil? Let me see the hands of anyone who didn’t bring a pencil.” No hands go up. “While I talk to
Khun
Poke, you copy three times the characters I wrote on the board, and then we’ll play a game with them. Ting?” A boy nods, and Anna begins signing and then says, for the benefit of the hearing students, “Ting will go to the board with Chalee and make the signs for
mother, father, brother, sister
, and
hello
, and Chalee will draw them on the board. We’ll try them when I get back. Remember,” she says to the children, “the best way to understand each other is to talk to each other.”

The kids at the door part as Rafferty and Anna come through. None of them is looking at Rafferty. The two newcomers on their cots watch Anna, too, but when she smiles at them, one looks down and the other turns his back. The one who looked down looks back up a second later.

Rafferty says, “I’m, um, amazed.”

“I talked to Father Bill yesterday,” Anna says. She’s gazing at him with such intensity he feels as though his reaction could decide her fate. “They’ve got seven non-hearing kids inside the compound, and they’re having trouble teaching them. I used to teach—I mean, back before—before—”

“Before they fired you,” Rafferty says, “because you didn’t tell the cops everything you knew about what I was doing.”

“Back then,” Anna says, and her discomfort about that time in their lives makes her blink rapidly and look down. “Father Bill said, if I can teach them at the same time I teach Treasure and Dok and Chalee, then Boo can keep Treasure here. We still have to find her a different room, but Boo will let the three of them sleep in the office for a while, and—well, who knows? Maybe she’ll make progress. Those two are angels.”

Rafferty is simultaneously delighted and ashamed of himself. He says, “This is better than anything I could have hoped for.”

“And for
me
,” Anna says, “for me, it’s like being let back into paradise. I’m back, I’m back working with children again.”

“Do they know Treasure’s story?”

“Not yet.” She clasps her hands in front of her chest as though she’s about to sing. Her face is more open than Rafferty has ever seen it. “We’re all going to write our stories, as soon as they can begin to scratch the first words. They’re all ashamed. Even here, with each other, they’re still ashamed. So first they’ll talk to each other and then they’ll write to each other, and when the secrets are out, they won’t be ashamed any more.”

Rafferty lets the words echo in his head for a moment, thinking of Miaow. He says, “You’re going to work a miracle.”

“That’s a teacher’s job,” she says.

“I need a minute with Treasure.”

“Out here?”

“No, if it’s okay with you, I’ll go in and talk with her. Just a few seconds.”

“Fine. So she can hear you over the kids, we’ll start with the signing. Chalee should have drawn them all by now.”

As they go back into the room, they find everyone turned to face them, except Chalee and the boy called Ting, who are still busy at the whiteboard. Rafferty edges between the chairs toward Treasure’s corner. Passing the chair Chalee had vacated, he sees on top of her stack of recycled paper another drawing of Sumalee, her sister. On impulse, he moistens an index finger and slides it off the stack, folding it into quarters. He slips the picture into his hip pocket and kneels down beside Treasure’s chair. When their heads are level, she pushes her chair back a few inches but holds his gaze.

“Anna can help you,” he says.

She looks down at the floor as though the words are an enormous disappointment. When her eyes come up, they go past him for a split second and then return to his. She says nothing.

“I have something I have to do. I should be finished tomorrow, maybe even tonight. Then I’ll come back. I’ll come every day.”

Her lips move silently, as though she’s making sure she has the sounds right, and she says, “I stay here?”

“Can you?” he asks. “For now? People here care about you.”

Her eyes dart past him again, looking at whatever she glanced at before, and then they come back, and she nods.

“See you tomorrow. I promise.” He gets up, wanting to touch her but afraid to violate the distance between them, and she extends a finger and snags the sleeve of his T-shirt as he rises. She allows the weight of her arm to hang from it for a second, and lets go. He reaches to pat her hand but pulls back, still not sure whether to touch her.

Turning to go, he sees the boy with the gouged cheek staring at him and he realizes who Treasure had been looking at. The boy avoids his eyes until Anna says, “Say goodbye to Mr. Rafferty, everybody,” and then the boy gives Rafferty the deep-dredged look he has seen from so many of these children, the look that says,
So you’re not my adult, either
.

I
T ISN
’
T UNTIL
he’s dragged his regrets around the bend in the alley that he hears the men behind him.

He turns. Two figures saunter into sight and stop. They’re not particularly big and they’re not particularly powerful-looking, but there’s a kind of compressed violence in the way they face him. The smell of cigarette smoke makes them feel closer than they are. The one who’s smoking shifts his weight rapidly from foot to foot with an energy that might be chemical.

Rafferty backs up against the wall, putting the men to his right. Something in his gut crumples at the thought that he led them there, straight to Treasure, because he doubted Anna. Because he couldn’t trust the judgment of the best friend he’s ever had, who loves her. It takes an effort, but he pushes the despair aside and does a quick survey of the terrain. To his left is the mouth of the alley, the way he entered. Even with his eyes on the two to his right, he still sees, in his peripheral vision, the other two as they come in from the street.

One of them is the brutish-looking man who had tried to use his knife on Miaow.

Rafferty has nothing, not so much as a butter knife. His Glock is in the apartment. He’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes. And a belt.

At a signal he doesn’t see, all four men begin to move toward him.

If he goes right, he’ll have to get past the two he saw first, and he’d be leading them back toward Treasure, Anna, and the children. To his left, the alley leads to the street, to the occasional car, to the possibility of watching eyes, even allies.

Not a hard choice.

They’ve advanced four or five steps toward him now, and he sees what they want to do: they’re trying to form a semicircle, pushing him against the wall. As the brutish man pulls out his knife, the decision becomes much simpler.

Rafferty puts a steadying hand on the wall, trying to look irresolute, and his other hand goes to the heavy buckle of his belt. It takes one snap to unfasten it. He angles right, his back to the street, as though he’s going to try to run back to Boo’s. When he’s facing away from the man with the knife, he tugs the belt, sliding it out of all but the last couple of loops on his jeans.

They’re about three meters from him at this point, and he knows he needs all that distance to work up some speed, so he pushes off the wall with his free hand and whirls, yanking the belt free and breaking into a run, sliding his hand down to the perforated end, leaving the heavy buckle hanging free. One of the men shouts a caution, but he drowns them out with a scream that surprises even him, and he swings the belt in a blurred, whirring circle over his head and leaps toward the man with the knife.

The man jumps back, but Rafferty is already leaning into another long stride, and then he swings the belt buckle down at a 45-degree angle, slashing it the full length of the man’s face.

Instinctively, the knifeman brings his hands up to his face, which is already pouring blood, and the other man takes a step back. Rafferty closes with the knifeman, grabs his hair with the hand holding the belt, yanks the man’s head up, and drives a straight, short left to his unprotected throat. Then he shoves the man straight at his partner, and while the knifeman is still making the cramped, agonized sound that’s probably supposed to be a
scream, Rafferty is between him and the wall, running full out for the street.

He hits the sidewalk and sprints right, not thinking about anything except covering ground. He hears them behind him, at least two pair of feet, but he doesn’t want to turn and look. Coming up is a yellowish streetlamp, the only one on the block, throwing a jaundiced light that brings the buildings’ corners into sharp relief and reveals nothing in the way of help, not a pedestrian, not an open door, not a lighted window. He passes the light and, twenty meters ahead, he sees another lane, sloping down toward the river, on the other side of the street—the lane Chinh used to get here after they got lost—and he takes the diagonal, leaping off the curb and risking a quick look back. He sees three of them behind him, and then he’s across the road but he snags his toe on the opposite curb and almost goes down, fighting his own momentum and windmilling his arms to stay upright. He doesn’t fall, but they close half the distance, and Rafferty, still off balance, manages at the last moment to turn enough to slam his left shoulder against the brick, and at that instant he hears a sound that seems to punch him in the ear and something whines past his cheek and blows a cupful of brick from the wall.

His face is stinging. He knows he’s bleeding from sharp-edged brick fragments. He can’t outrun the gun, so he turns and lets his arms drop to his sides and watches them come.

The yellowish streetlight is behind them, stretching the men’s shadows toward Rafferty so that the dark imprints of their heads and shoulders extend almost to his feet. The man holding the gun is in front. The other two are slightly behind him, about two meters away from him on either side, deployed as though they expect him to try to run. The man on the right talks into a cell phone.

The one with the gun says, “Don’t move an inch.”

The one to the left says, in English, “And drop your belt.”

“
Drop your belt
?” Rafferty says, letting it fall at his feet. “That’s heroic dialogue.”

“The hero,” says the man with the gun, “is the one who wins.”

“Can I move now?”

“If you want me to shoot you.”

“I actually don’t think,” Rafferty says, “that your boss wants you to kill me.”

“Yeah?” the man with the phone says, putting it away. “Think again.”

A sound like gravel in a clothes dryer, but full of rage, makes the man with the gun look over his shoulder. The knifeman, his face and shirt black with blood in the sodium-yellow light, hobbles out of the alley, one hand at his throat and the other holding the knife. The man with the gun says, “He’s got a problem with you.”

The three of them are standing in the street, too far from Rafferty for him to move on them, but close enough to shoot him. The knifeman drags himself along, one eye swollen closed in the canyon gouged by the belt buckle, his bared teeth the only light in his face. The other men fan out to give him a wider passage and, perhaps, to get away from the knife.

An absolutely blinding tide of rage—this piece of
gutter shit
chased Miaow with a knife—washes through Rafferty, sweeping away his lifelong dread of knives, and he says, “Come
on
, motherfucker.”

The man with the knife leaps.

“
Hey
,” the man with the gun says. It’s a warning, and the one with the phone shouts something to echo it, but his voice is drowned out by the roar of a motor, and out of the lane leading down to the river comes a black SUV, angling right and cutting the corner so tightly its wheels bounce onto the sidewalk and down again as it surges past Rafferty, scattering the men in the street like bowling pins. The vehicle clips the man with the gun and sends him spinning and then accelerates straight at the knifeman, blocking him from Rafferty’s view until he hears a kind of wet impact he knows immediately he’ll never forget, and the vehicle backs up, away from the thing crumpled in the street, and one door opens wide with Chinh at the wheel, and Nguyen says, “Get in.”

“I
WOULD HAVE
been there a little earlier,” Chinh says, “but I got lost again.”

“I think it timed out nicely,” Rafferty says. He hears the vapidity of his reply, but he’s in the grip of an elation—
I’m alive!
—that even the sight of his bleeding face in the mirror can’t douse. From the moment he saw the knifeman dragging himself into that street, he’d figured it was over.