For the Dead (42 page)

He goes out and closes the door. At the bottom of the stairs, he says to the butler, “He’ll call you if he wants you,” and lets himself out.

Eight minutes later by Rafferty’s watch the light in the window goes out. Before he’s drawn three breaths, the police charge in at the sound of the shot.

“F
URNITURE IS GETTING
moved around on the top floors,” Arthit says. “There may be a great public silence since the suicide, but behind closed doors people are wheeling desks from place to place. Pictures are being hung.”

He and Rafferty are knee-to-knee at Rafferty’s desk, shoehorned into the space behind the big flatscreen. Rose is watching something that features a great many women speaking English, and once in a while she laughs. It almost tempts Rafferty to listen to what’s being said, but only almost. Miaow is in her room, rehearsing the speech from
Small Town
she wants to read for her audition. It was going to be a scene between Julie and Ned, but at the last moment Andrew called to say he couldn’t come.

“Thanom’s going to get a promotion.” Arthit takes a healthy slug of the Crown Royal Poke had poured. Rafferty’s bottle of beer sweats on his thigh, where he’s put it to keep from making a ring on the top of the desk. His jeans are wet. “It’s more a lateral than a forward pass, but he seems to be happy.”

“
Seems
to be?”

“Our friendship has cooled. He’s found a way, since the department just wants to close the door on everything, to keep the money in that phony account. So he’s better off financially, he’s got a higher rank, and he knows he fell apart in front of me in the embassy. He doesn’t need me any more.”

“Well,” Rafferty says, drinking. “We certainly need you
here
, if you ever have time to spare …”

“And Miaow?” Arthit lowers his voice. “Happy ending in sight?”

“Not even close,” Rafferty says. “Because Nguyen and I talked to that financial reporter Kalmenson about Ton just before the suicide, the ambassador is pulling him out. They may already be on their way back to Vietnam.”

Arthit says, “I’m sorry.”

“Andrew called about two hours ago. He was supposed to come over and rehearse a scene from the play for the auditions, but when he called he was in a car on the way to the airport.”

“How is she?”

“In her room. I think she’d already given up on the relationship, but you know.”

Arthit says, “One thing I’ve learned is that letting go of a relationship is a solid-gold bitch.”

The two of them sit in silence for a moment, until they’re brought back to the present by someone emoting from the flatscreen, with a British accent since Rose hasn’t officially found the remote yet and Miaow left it on the English Channel or something.

Arthit regards the long high rectangle of the television, its cables trailing across the carpet to the wall. “This is an interesting decorating effect,” he says. “It’s like rebuilding part of the Berlin Wall in your living room.”

“Rose spends a lot of time in front of it,” Rafferty says, raising his voice. “She’s watching for two.”

Rose says, as though she’s been saving it up, “The baby already speaks English.”

“The baby,” Arthit says. He grins. “The baby.”

Rafferty feels himself grin back. “Yeah. The baby.”

Rose says, “Poke is a wonderful father.”

Rafferty says, “Are you eavesdropping?”

“Shhh,” Rose says. “The good girl is starting to cry.”

Rafferty puts a finger to his lips, and Arthit drains his glass and puts it down. “I actually had two reasons to come over,” he says softly. “First is to tell you that we found the bodies of the men who killed Sawat and Thongchai.”

“How?”

“A tip.” He shrugs at Rafferty’s expression. “Well, the tip came from Jurak, but as far as the world knows, they were killed by Bangkok police in the name of duty. Their deaths close the case. The story is, they took revenge and got caught, and the names of the victims they were avenging are being kept confidential to protect the innocent members of the victims’ families, who have been through so much, et cetera. Jurak is going to live under a microscope for the next few years, but no one will charge him with anything because it would open up Pandora’s Box. It’s all over, case closed. Ton will get a full police funeral.”

“It all sounds so tidy,” Rafferty says. “An orderly, grammatical paragraph without a true sentence in it anywhere.”

“ ‘Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land?’ ” Arthit says. “That’s Alexander Pope, smug as always.”

“Sometimes I think the land should just be allowed to sink. Something better might rise in its place.”

Arthit tilts his head in Rose’s direction. “There’s a lot here we wouldn’t want to lose. Which brings me to the second reason I’m here. Anna wants to know whether you think it would be a good idea for you and Rose and Miaow and her and me to cross our fingers and take Treasure out to dinner.”

“Gee, I don’t know. I mean, Treasure’s not—” He stops. Having to deal with Treasure might make it easier for the four of them to go out for the first time.

Arthit picks up his empty glass and puts it down again and says, “And Dok and Chalee.”

“We’d love to,” Rafferty says. “We’ll be like a buffer zone between Treasure and everyone else. The Balkans.”

From the other side of the screen, Rose says, “That would be ripping.”

“Anna’s so happy,” Arthit says. “What she needed in her life was kids she could teach. She’s in heaven.”

Rafferty says, “If I knew what to do about Miaow, I’d be pretty close myself.”

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, Rafferty sits beside Rose on the couch and watches Miaow, in front of the dark television screen, perform Julie’s farewell to the world. She stops and takes a shaky breath before the final goodbye, and what he sees in her face brings tears to his eyes. When she’s done, he applauds and goes into the bedroom before they spill over and give him away.

He’s sitting on the bed, trying to think of an explanation for fleeing the room, when Miaow comes in. He says, “You’re going to be wonderful.” Then he’s blinking again.

She sits next to him on the bed. In the living room, the television comes back on. She says, “You’re a crybaby.”

“I’ve always been a crybaby,” he says. “I cry when someone bites into a carrot.”

She sniffs and glances at him out of the corner of her eye. “Do you remember,” she says, “when you used motorcycles in traffic to explain geological strata to me?”

“Yes. I mean, I suppose so.”

“Well, I remember it. It was a cool explanation.”

He looks over her, but she’s gazing into her lap. “Thanks.”

“I’ve thought of the name for the baby. Remember, you said—”

“I remember.”

“If it’s a girl, I mean.”

“Great,” he says. “What is it?”

She says, “Angelina. You know, because Angelina Jolie is so—”

“Right,” he says, without even knowing he’s interrupting.

“—beautiful and everything, and she adopts all those kids and stuff.”

Time has pretty much oozed to a stop as far as he’s concerned, so he has no idea how much of it has managed to shudder past by the time he says, “Great. That’s—
great
. Just, you know, tell your mom about it.”

“Okay,” she says, and she gets up and leaves.

He sits there perched on the edge of the mattress, thinking,
nine months, we have nine months to find a way around this
, and then, from the living room, he hears Miaow and Rose burst into laughter. Not polite, discreet laughter, but choking, gasping, nose-running laughter. One of them says, “Shhhh,” and then it starts up again, Miaow carrying the high violin line and Rose the cello.

It goes on for quite a while, and as long as it lasts he sits there and listens to it.

W
HEN PEOPLE ASK
(at bookstores, usually) what the Poke Rafferty books are about, I often say they’re about a travel writer who was searching for a home and found it in, of all places, Bangkok. Then I say something about how the books’ real protagonist is a family of three who all see each other as a final chance for happiness. This last response frequently has the advantage of shutting down that line of inquiry for a while.

But if the questions continue, I say that when the series is finished, it’ll tell Miaow’s story from the time she was adopted to the time she leaves the nest Poke and Rose have created for her. Privately (at least until now) I’ve always hoped I could continue to write the books from the time the family forms, in A
Nail Through the Heart
, until it’s reduced from three to two with Miaow’s inevitable departure. The very thought makes me misty.

Some time ago, I emerged, blinking in the sunlight, from the cave in which I isolate myself while I’m writing, and I went to a fan convention called Bouchercon, that was being held in some midwestern city.
The Queen of Patpong
had just come out, and my publishers at the time thought it would be a good idea for me to, you know, get some sun, eat some solid food, and talk to a few people.

So I went, and it was one of the greatest experiences of my writing life. I had person after person grab me to talk about the books, and one theme emerged: a
lot
of people were skipping to the end of each book before they read the beginning. And why was that?

They wanted to make sure that nothing bad happened to Miaow.

This took me completely off guard. I knew
I
loved Miaow, but I had no idea that so many other people felt the same. Several people who had read
Queen
, which was mostly about Rose, asked when I’d write a book about Miaow. So this is it, I guess—the
first
book about Miaow, anyway. I hope those people I met in (I think) St. Louis enjoy it. I hope you do, too.

Those of you who have gotten this far in the other books in this series know that I usually talk about the music I listened to as I wrote. This time around, many of the artists who supplied the soundtrack were relatively new to me. Probably more of it was written to Fun.
than any other artist.
For the Dead
was often difficult to write, and the two albums by Fun. gave me energy and a perspective that carried me over many miles of muddy road. Miaow has been listening to them at the beginning of the book, and the section titles are all taken from songs by Fun except for “Drowning Girls,” which is a misheard phrase from the song “Benson Hedges.” Imagine my surprise, after writing about 150 pages with the image of drowning girls before my eyes, when I looked up the lyric online and realized I’d gotten it wrong; it’s actually “Holy Ghost.” How
embarrassing
.

Fun’s members decided on an eye-catching way to spell the band’s name: fun.—complete with lowercase “f” and a period. On a page of manuscript, it looks like a typographical sneeze, so we’ve used “Fun” throughout the book, knowing we ran the risk of outraging purists.

Most of the other music was by female artists: Lindi Ortega, Amanda Shires, Tegan & Sara, Mindy Clark, First Aid Kit, Kacey Musgraves, Aimee Mann, Jenny Lewis, Carrie Rodriguez, Joan Armatrading, Alexis Krauss (of Sleigh Bells), the ever-essential Emmylou Harris, and a dozen more. If there seems to be a lot of country music in there, it’s because adolescence is essentially a country song.

A few of the artists I played (Lindi Ortega, for example) were recommended to me by readers who contacted me through my website,
www.timothyhallinan.com
, to suggest music. Please, if you have music to suggest, let me know.

Thanks to all who helped out with this book, including the phenomenal crew at Soho: editor extraordinaire Juliet Grames, whose contribution was substantial and even educational; widely-read marketing maven Paul Oliver; paragon of efficiency Rachel Kowal; and, riding herd, publisher Bronwen Hruska.

Special credit, as always to my amazing wife and first listener, Munyin Choy-Hallinan, whom I still don’t deserve; my agent, Bob Mecoy, who offered cheerleading when cheerleading was necessary. The type was scanned six ways from Sunday by Everett Kaser, Alan Katz, and Marie Orozco, who caught many errors, large and small.

Brett Battles, one of my favorite writers, helped out immensely by reminding me several times that I always think every book is my last. Now that this one is finished and I’m writing the next, I realize how much I needed that perspective.