The Fourth Watcher (3 page)

Rose feels the slight prickling that announces that tears are on the way. She blinks. “That's so sweet of you, Peachy.”

“I mean it. And today is obviously the right day to tell you.”

Rose looks up, surprised. There's no way Peachy could know. “Today?”

“It's eight months today,” Peachy says, as though it should be obvious. “This is our anniversary.”

“Oh, my gosh. Is it? It doesn't seem possible.”

“You forgot,” Peachy says bravely, swallowing disappointment. “Oh, well. Your life is so full.”

“
My
life?” Rose asks without thinking. “Yes, I guess it is.”

“You're lucky,” Peachy says.

“I suppose I am. I never thought I was. Maybe I'm not used to it yet.”

“
Get
used to it,” Peachy says, a bit shortly. “It's a sin not to appreciate a good life. Somebody should hit you with a stick. I wish someone had hit me, fifteen years ago.”

Rose lowers her head. “Go ahead.”

“No. What I want to do…” She hesitates and then plunges in. “I want to invite you to have dinner with me tonight. To celebrate.”

Rose sees the hope in Peachy's eyes, sees a different woman from the resentful partner Poke had chained her to all those months ago. She leans across the desk and puts her hand on Peachy's. “I'd love to,” she says. “But tonight is something special. Something with Poke, I mean. Can we do it tomorrow?”

Peachy turns her hand palm up and grasps Rose's. She gives it a squeeze. “Tomorrow,” she says. “Tomorrow will be fine.” She puts the remaining stacks of bills in the desk drawer and pushes her chair back, preparing to rise. “But what's tonight?”

“Nothing much,” Rose says. “It's supposed to be for me.” She stands, slipping the envelope full of money into her pocket. “But it's really for Poke.”

T
he little man from the bank steps out into the heat of the evening. He pauses in the shade of the bank's door, pulls out a cell phone, and dials the number he knows best. One ring. Two rings. Three rings, and his stomach dips all the way to his feet.

“Hello?” his wife says.

“Oh,”
he says without thinking. “Oh, thank you.”

“Why? What did I do?” She sounds pleased.

“You're there,” he says. “I don't tell you enough how much it means to me that you're there.”

They have been married nine years, and he is not a demonstrative man. His wife says, “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” he says. He waits, eyes closed, listening to his heart pound.

“And that's why you called? To tell me you're glad I'm here?”

“Well,” he says, and then a hand lands on his shoulder. Another takes the phone from his hand and snaps it closed. The teller smells cheap cologne. He has to fight the urge to bolt.

“Give it to me,” the man says. He is tall for an Asian, with a broad, pale face and very tightly cut eyes on either side of a wide nose that has been broken, perhaps several times. The body beneath the tight jacket is bulky with muscle.

The bank teller reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a fat envelope. The man takes it, gives it an experimental heft, and doesn't seem to like what he feels. Cologne rolls off him in heavy waves, a scent many flowers died to create. The tight eyes come up to the bank teller's face, flat as burned matches. “How much?”

“One hundred eighty thousand.”

“Not enough.” His Thai is strongly accented. He slaps the envelope against his hand in disgust.

“Slow day,” the bank teller says. His own voice sounds thick and distant.

The man pulls another envelope from beneath his belt and hands it to the teller. Like the first, the new envelope is heavy manila, with the date scrawled across it. “Have a better day Monday,” he says. “Or maybe no one will answer the phone next time.”

I
t's a perfume from about a thousand years ago,” Rafferty says. “It's called White Shoulders, and the man's squirt gun was full of it. I'm lucky he didn't get me in the eyes. Hand me the bowl, okay?”

“It smells
terrible,
” Miaow says. She passes him the bowl, wipes pink frosting from her chin with a brown finger, glances at the finger, and puts it in her mouth.

“Terrible like what?” Rafferty says without looking up from what he's doing. “Terrible doesn't tell me anything. If you want to be a writer, Miaow, you need to be specific.” The cake won't come out of the pan. He turns the pan upside down over the yellow platter and gives it a discreet whack with his knuckles.

Miaow had startled him two weeks earlier by announcing she was going to be a writer. Like
him,
she said. He'd had to swallow a sudden lump in his throat before he could say anything.

“It's s
weet
terrible,” she says. “Terrible like…” Concentration plows
a tiny furrow across Miaow's flawless eight-year-old nose. “Like if a flower threw up.”

Rafferty raises his eyebrows. “Pretty good.” He burps the cake pan again. The cake doesn't budge.

Miaow's eyes are on the cake pan. “White Shoulders is a dumb name.”

“I didn't name it, Miaow.”

She dredges a thumb through the frosting bowl and licks the clot of pink. “Why would they call it White Shoulders?”

“I don't know.” He takes the spatula from the bowl and runs it again around the edge of the cake pan, exactly as the magazine recipe directs. He finds the maneuver considerably more difficult than it sounds. “Maybe somebody thought it was sexy.”

“And you?” Rose asks from the living room. She is curled like a dark odalisque on Rafferty's white leather hassock, which she has pushed in front of the sliding glass door to catch the light. She is in an indolent race with time, trying to finish painting her toenails before the sun dips below the jagged horizon of the Bangkok skyline. Night comes fast here. Her lustrous black hair has been pinned up, baring a slender neck the color of the gathering dusk, with a throb of pink beneath. Her jeans have been traded for a pair of shorts, baring the legs that literally made Rafferty gasp the first time he saw them, when she stepped onstage in the bar. The white shirt hangs in immaculate folds; in a phenomenon that has mystified Rafferty since he met her, Rose's clothes never wrinkle. She has stuck the ever-present cigarette between her toes to free both hands, and the smoke curls like the ghosts of snakes around her hair. Her eyes slide sideways to his. “You,” she repeats. “Poke Rafferty. Do
you
think white shoulders are sexy?”

“Actually,” Rafferty says, his gaze sliding easily down the familiar curve of her back, “I'm pretty firmly in the brown-shoulders column.”

“Eeeek,” Rose says languidly, fanning her toes. “A sex tourist.”

At the sound of the word “sex,” Miaow's eyes swing to Rose and then up at Rafferty, who is looking straight at her.

“Not in front of the c-h-i-l-d,” Rafferty says to Rose, still watching Miaow.

Miaow drops her gaze to the mixing bowl and scoops out more frosting. “W-h-y n-o-t?” she asks.

“Because, Miaow,” Rafferty says, “in spite of the fact that you think you know everything in the world, you are approximately eight years old and there are still things adults only talk to adults about.” The “approximately” is necessary. None of them actually knows how old she is, but they settled on eight soon after she left the sidewalks and moved into his apartment. For all he knows, she's a tall seven or a short nine.

“Like your dumb book,” she says. “You won't talk about that either.”

“The word ‘dumb' is getting a lot of work,” Rafferty says mildly. “Dumb name for a perfume, dumb book. And have you read it, Miaow?”

“You haven't
written
it yet.” She turns toward the living room. “He can't get the
cake
out of the
pan,
” she sings to Rose in Thai.

“This is just a complete surprise,” Rose replies, also in Thai. She is inserting white cotton pads between brown toes and giving her total attention to the task. She takes the cigarette from between her toes, glances at it critically, squeezes that final ghastly puff from the filter, and stubs it into submission in the swimming-pool-size ashtray on the carpet.

Rafferty twists the pan like a Möbius loop. “Of course I can get it out,” he says. “Miaow just expects me to behave like a man and put my fist through the pan or jump up and down on it. Instead I'm getting in touch with my feminine side. Look how
patient
I am.” He shakes the pan over the platter. “Get
out
of there, you bugger.”

“How about this?” Miaow says. “Let's play I'm going to write a story about you. And you have to tell me stuff so I can write it. Why did the man shoot you? And why did he use perfume instead of water?”

“He shot me to make a point,” Rafferty says, hearing the irritation in his voice. “And, by the way, we have a name for people who criticize books they haven't read.”

“What?” Miaow demands.

“We call them Republicans,” Rafferty says, watching his knuckles go white on the rim of the pan.

Miaow shakes her head. “I don't know what that means.”

“And they say laughter has no borders.” Rafferty tosses a glance across the room at Rose, who is bent lovingly over her foot. He would not be surprised to see her lean down and lick it, and he briefly hopes
that she will. A spill of ebony hair has slipped loose, exploded by the failing sun into a riot of dark color, the way a rainbow might shine against the night sky. “Actually, the cake is just a
touch
stuck,” he admits.

She does not look up. “Did you remember the butter?”

“The butter?” Rafferty says, and Miaow says, in English, “Oh, brother.” He can actually hear her roll her eyes.

“To coat the pan,” Rose says to her foot. “You were supposed to rub a stick of butter around inside the—”

“Seemed like a lot of fat,” Rafferty says. Rose's head comes up and Miaow's comes around. Their expressions are identical, the reluctant anxiety of someone who is beginning to doubt the intelligence of a new pet. “I used honey,” he says.

“Honey,”
the females say together, and Rose adds, “Why didn't you just use cement?”

“Let me,” Miaow says, taking the pan and bumping him with surprising force for a child so small. She puts her thumbs in the center of the pan's bottom and looks from the surface of the cake—slightly burned, Rafferty suddenly notices—up to Rafferty. Her eyes narrow in calculation. “If I can get it out, you have to tell us why you smell so bad. About the man with the squirt gun. And you have to tell Rose, too, as a present for her happybirthday.”

“Deal,” Rafferty says, watching her handle the pan. “By the way, ‘happy' and ‘birthday' are two words, not one.” The words somehow arrived in Thailand permanently joined, linguistic Siamese twins in Siam.

“That's nice,” Miaow says. “What about the man with the gun?”

“Do you want to hear this, Birthday Girl?” Rafferty asks.

“You come home smelling like something hanging from a rearview mirror,” Rose says, “and you don't think I want to hear the excuse?”

“Okay,” Rafferty says. Miaow puts down the pan and goes to the hassock to join Rose, and Rafferty leans against the kitchen counter. “It was for my book.” As little as he wants to talk about this on Rose's birthday, it at least postpones the moment he is dreading, the moment he is certain Rose doesn't expect. He switches to Thai for Rose's benefit. “I'm writing about living…um, sort of outside the law. Not really doing anything terrible,” he adds as Miaow's eyebrows contract in her Executive Vice President Expression. “Not hurting anyone, but not exactly behaving either. It's called
Living Wrong.
”

“So you got shot because you were being bad,” Miaow says in English.

“I was
learning
how to be bad,” Rafferty says. “I've found nine people who are…well, they're crooks. Each of them will teach me how to do something that's against the law—just a little bit, Miaow, don't get crazy—and then I'm going to do it one time. I'll write about learning how and then about doing it.”

“Does somebody want to read about that?” Miaow asks doubtfully.

“I don't know. All I know is that my publishers are paying me to write it. I never ask whether people want to read it until I've cashed the check.”

“But what kinds of things
are
you doing?” Miaow demands. “What were you doing when you got shot with the perfume?”

“Learning to be a spy. Arnold Prettyman is teaching me how to be a spy.” Prettyman is a former CIA agent who, like hundreds of other spooks orphaned by the thawing of the Cold War, rolled downhill into Bangkok. “Arnold's teaching me to follow people around Bangkok without getting caught, and once in a while he has someone follow
me.
I'm supposed to spot the people who are following me and then get away from them. Today I spotted three. I lost two of them, but the man who caught me shot me with a squirt gun.”

“Why perfume?” Rose asks, fanning the fumes away with a tapering hand.

“Better than a bullet,” Rafferty says. “Anyhow, it'll help me remember not to make that mistake again. A nice faceful of White Shoulders.”

Miaow makes a roof out of her fingers and looks at it as though she is daring it to collapse. It is not a carefree pose.

“So,” Rafferty says in what he hopes is a light tone, “that's all there is to it. I was practicing being followed, and I got it wrong, and I got squirted with perfume. Nothing dangerous about it.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Rose says, a tone so neutral it shimmers with menace.

“But—” Miaow says, and stops. “You didn't want to tell me about this. Why would anybody write a book they can't tell a kid about?”

“I'd like to know that, too,” Rose contributes. She has long been of the opinion that Rafferty's books inspire bad behavior in tourists, a conviction he privately shares.

Miaow shakes her head. “I don't know,” she says. “Why don't you
write about bears? Or fish? Or elephants that can sing? Why don't you write something that makes people happy?”

“Not everybody can write
Fluffy Bunnies in Bubble Land,
” Rafferty says, hearing the defensive edge in his voice. “People write about what they're interested in. This is what I'm interested in.” He avoids the strongest argument, which is that he needs the advance his agent has negotiated for
Living Wrong.
His savings, never particularly robust, have become positively tubercular.

“
What's
what you're interested in?” Miaow challenges.

“What I always write about. What goes on at the edges.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything.” He takes a breath and slows himself. “Look,” he says. “You walk down the street, any street, and nine out of ten people are doing the same thing you are: They're shopping, or looking through windows, or going to meet somebody, or just getting from one place to another.” He looks across the counter at Miaow. “Right?”

“So what?” Miaow says.

“That's exactly right. So what? Those nine people aren't interesting. But the
other
one, the tenth one, is doing something else. He doesn't want us to know what it is. He's afraid of something. He's waiting for someone he's not supposed to see. He's just broken the law, or he's just about to. He rigged the lottery. There's a tarantula in his pocket. He put broken glass in his shoes that morning as a religious penance. He looks around a little too much. He licks his lips a lot. He's the one I'm interested in.”

“I'm not,” Miaow says promptly. “That was
me.
When I was begging, or cutting purses, or sneaking behind some restaurant where they threw good food away. Or running away from some man who wanted me to be bad with him. That's not interesting, it's ugly.” She looks around the small room. At him, at Rose, at the cake pan on the counter. At the walls keeping them safe and together. “
This
is what's interesting.”

“I agree,” Rose says.

“Then the two of you can write your own book,” Rafferty says. “That's not what I do, okay?”

For a moment nobody speaks. Miaow is looking at him with a puzzled expression. Finally Rose says, “My, my.”

“Well,” Rafferty says, “you asked.”

Rose curves a defensive arm around Miaow. “When you touch a dog and he bites,” Rose says, “you're usually touching someplace that hurts.”

“What if it wasn't perfume?” Miaow's voice is pitched a half tone higher than usual. “What if it was a real gun?”

“It wasn't,” Rafferty says, feeling the whole evening go south. He reaches out and defiantly scoops frosting from the bowl.

“I don't want a fight on my happybirthday,” Rose says. “Poke, you promise to stay alive for Miaow and me, and, Miaow, you stop worrying so much. You're going to be an old lady before you're ten.”

“I'll be careful, Miaow,” Rafferty says. “Honest.”

Miaow starts to argue, but Rose lifts a hand. “Miaow,” she says, “you said you could get the cake out of the pan. Can you?”

“Sure,” Miaow says, her tone making it clear the discussion isn't over. She slides off the hassock and comes around the counter, so she is standing next to Rafferty. She turns the pan over and says, under her breath, “Fluffy bunnies.” Rafferty puts a hand on her shoulder, but she steps sideways, out from under it, and says, with the same muted vehemence, “Bubble land,” and then she does something fast with her thumbs to the bottom of the pan. The cake falls onto the plate with a surprising
clunk
and immediately breaks in half. Miaow gives it a critical look and says, “I'll fix it with icing.”