The Hot Countries (11 page)

Arthit says, “It's so awkward. She's a wonderful kid. She deserves a good life. But Anna—Anna has taken Treasure to heart in a way I don't completely understand. I'm not saying I don't
 . . .
care for Treasure, too. Of course I do. But to leave Chalee, and Dok—”

“I'd take Dok in a minute,” Rafferty says. “If Rose weren't pregnant, if I knew how Miaow would react, if I were rich, if, if, if.” He sits back but promptly leans forward so he can whisper again. “In the end, I guess, you'll just have to accept that you can't rescue everyone.”

“It's one thing not to
rescue
them,” Arthit says between his teeth. “It's another thing to wave it around under their noses and then yank it away, and that's what I feel like we're doing with Chalee.”

“Let's just think about one thing at a time,” Rafferty says, and then he lifts a finger to his lips, and Chalee comes in with a silver tray. On it are two mugs of coffee.

“These are for you,” Chalee says proudly. “I made the coffee myself. I had help, but I did most of it. I poured
all
the water.”

Arthit's glance at Rafferty says, essentially,
Shoot me
.

“It smells so
good
, Chalee,” Rafferty says. “Which one is mine?”

“The one you want,” she says.

He squints at the cups, looking racked by indecision, “Mmmmmm, no. I can't decide. You pick one for me.”

“Okay,” Chalee says with certainty. “The blue one.”

“That's the one I really wanted,” Rafferty says, taking it. “How did you know?”

“I just did,” Chalee says, looking pleased with herself. “So is this one all right with you
 . . .
uhhh, sir?” she says to Arthit, holding out the tray with the remaining cup.

“That's the one
I
wanted,” Arthit says, glancing at Rafferty as though for approval. He takes the coffee, and Chalee wheels around and runs out of the room, balancing the tray on her head.

Rafferty says, “You'll learn,” and as the tray clatters to the floor in the dining room, his phone rings. He fishes it out of his pocket and holds up a
Just a second
finger. “Hello?”

“Poke. This is Leon talking. You are coming?”

“I hadn't planned on it.”

“But Wallace is here. I
told
you Wallace would be here. And the other one, Varney. Varney was here and left something for you.”

“What is it?” He looks around the room, surprised to find himself on his feet. Arthit is staring up at him.

“It is an envelope,” Hofstedler says primly. “Sealed.”

“I'll get there as fast as I can.” He repockets the phone and says, “Varney. He left something for me at the Expat Bar.”

Arthit gets up, nodding in the direction of the living-room windows. “Maybe you should take the killer out there with you.”

Rafferty says, “Maybe I was right before. Maybe I should hire a dozen of them.”

11

Only Half Blind

The rain, which
had taken a break for a smoke or something while Rafferty was at Arthit's, has made a reappearance, and in the taxi he flags down, the wiper on the driver's side has lost its rubber blade, forcing the cabbie to lean sharply to his left to see out of the far half of the windshield. In Thai, Rafferty says, “Why don't you get out and switch them?”

“I'd get wet,” the driver says, steering around a bus and missing it by a couple of coats of paint.

“Better than being killed.”

“I am very good driver,” the driver says in English.

“I'm sure you are,” Rafferty says. “But think how much better you'd be if you were behind the steering wheel.”

“Every time have rain,” the driver explains, “I think I should change. But then rain stop and I forget. Do something else.”

“So don't switch them,” Rafferty says, still in Thai. “Buy another one. That way they'll
both
work. Listen, I'll get out here.”

“Two block more,” the driver says.

“This is fine,” Rafferty says, opening the door while the car is still moving. He reaches over and drops some bills on the driver's seat, and the cab comes to a stop. “Fix that thing,” he says, climbing out into the rain, too far from the curb and directly in front of an oncoming motorbike. Rafferty slams the door and leaps out of the bike's path, landing between two cars idling at the curb, and stops there, taking several long, deep breaths. He knows he's been apprehensive, even nervous, ever since the moment in the bar when he opened that note with the number on it, and this is not a state of mind that's optimal for survival. He needs to be calm and, to use a phrase he's borrowed from Rose, within his center. At the moment his center feels like a swarm of gnats.

So the thing to do is to be where he is,
right now
, to steady his breathing and his attention, to open himself to what's happening around him. To be as dispassionate and observant as a camera so he can see whatever's coming in time to jump out of its way.

He allows himself to feel the rain hitting his face and his bare arms. He listens to the sounds of the traffic, breathes in the distinctive monoxide bouquet of the Bangkok night. Lets the people on the sidewalk flow by, paying enough attention to them to resolve them into individuals without allowing his attention to snag on any of them. Inhales and exhales slowly and regularly, feeling his heart slow, the muscles in his shoulders and neck relax,
his mind quiet itself. A long time ago, watching Rose as she diced vegetables with a large, razor-sharp knife, the blade moving so fast it was a gleaming blur, he waited until she paused and then asked her how she avoided cutting herself, and she said, “This is the chopping meditation.”
And now
, he thinks,
time
for the walking-and-watching meditation
, and he takes his first step, up onto the curb and into the river of people on the sidewalk.

It's just another bright, garish, noisy, drunken Patpong night. The rain hasn't put much of a dent in the crowd, even though it's still relatively early: only a little before ten. In unusually clear focus, he sees the same night-market vendors he's seen a thousand times, flogging the same cheap crap in the booths, the same bar girls arm in arm with their interchangeable sweethearts, heading for the night's first or second hotel. He's momentarily distracted by a sudden certainty that Rose's story about Campeau could have been told more accurately in the first person, Bamboo Telegraph or no Bamboo Telegraph, but he waves it aside; it's been years since he's stopped taking personally all the things that happened to Rose, although the addition of Campeau—someone he knows and has never much liked—gives the topic a kind of fresh immediacy. He'd worn his attitude smooth, and suddenly it's gritty again.

Still, that has nothing to do with the walking-and-watching meditation, so he lets it float past like a puff of smoke and reorients himself, just in time to intercept a sweet smile, apparently genuine, from an extremely pretty girl in a short, swirly dress the color of violets. He's returning the smile when he realizes that the girl is Lutanh and that the guy who's got his arm wrapped possessively around her shoulders is giving him the stony eye. Rafferty turns the smile on him and says, “Be nice to her,” and steps aside to let them pass. The man, who just
might
be pushing the mascu
linity a bit, bristles at him reflexively but then gives him a sudden, surprisingly sweet, co-conspirator's grin, and Lutanh stretches up and kisses the side of the man's neck in approval. As they move away, she leans her head against her companion's chest, wiggling bye-bye fingers at Rafferty behind her back, and he finds himself hoping the evening works out for her.

Whatever that means. Rose was with
Campeau
?

Two doors away from the Expat Bar, he steps up onto the sidewalk and sees Pinky Holland slouching toward him, folded forward against the rain. His bald head, beaded with water, makes him look wetter than anyone else on the street. Pinky extends a hand, palm out, to stop Rafferty from coming any farther. He tiptoes to
the window and cups his hands around his eyes so he can see past the
dismal little Christmas lights, another of which has burned out, and then steps back, looking satisfied. He says, “Coast clear,” and opens the door. Rafferty waves Pinky through first and catches the door one-handed as it swings shut so he can pause and take a last sweep of the street. There's no bar girl with a birthmark, no bright blue eyes above a black mustache. Everything seems to be normal, or at least
Patpong
normal, which would qualify as headline-quality bizarre anywhere else in the world.

But he sees nothing he's reluctant to turn his back on, so he pushes the door the rest of the way open and goes in.

And has the sense, as he so often does when he first enters this room, that all motion in the place has been frozen since he was here last, that it's been as inert as the inside of a refrigerator. Now that his arrival has broken the spell, they can all resume the long-suspended moment: Toots mixing a drink behind the bar; Campeau, sitting and scowling where he always sits and scowls; the Growing Younger Man sipping something green enough to have been skimmed from the surface of a fetid pond; the silver-haired guy who might be named Ron resting his chin on his fist, like Rodin's
Thinker
, probably minus the thought; Pinky sliding into his pumpkin-colored booth; and, on the stool beside Leon, the only real change in the room: the slumped, once-powerful form of Wallace Palmer.

Wallace's hair, which had been curly and receding when Rafferty first met him, is now sparse and long and pasted so tightly across his scalp that it might have been ironed there. Its loss is cruelly offset by tufts of hair that seem to have taken refuge in his ears, from which they bristle aggressively. He's still slender and fit-looking, except for the slope of his shoulders, and his chin remains square and angular, but the skin below it falls in tight little accordion folds to an Adam's apple that protrudes as sharply as a chicken's beak, and the strong bone structure of his face seems to be surfacing, emerging as though it might soon push its way through the skin altogether to reveal the bony grin beneath. Everyone in the bar has grown older, Rafferty thinks, but Wallace seems to have been picked up by time and hurled forward, through several stages of hale old age, directly into infirmity.

“Hey, Wallace,” Poke says, pulling up the stool beside him.

“
Look
, Wallace, here is Poke,” Leon says, too loudly and with a kind of ghastly geniality, accompanied by a smile as empty as a pumpkin's. “You remember Poke, Wallace, yes?”

The look Wallace gives Rafferty doesn't seem to contain anything that could be mistaken for recognition, but he says, “Sure. Good to see you.” The voice is still deep, although there's a slight quaver that hadn't been there before. “Uhhhh, long time, right?”

Hofstedler gives the pot a determined stir. “Poke has been asking and asking about you, haven't you, Poke?”

“Sure have,” Poke lies. “All the time. Wondering what you were up to.”

“Yeah?” Wallace says. “I been
 . . .
busy.” He glances at Toots, like someone seeking confirmation, and then beyond her to the mirror. He squints at it for a moment, and then his face clears and he says, “Your
 . . .
your beautiful wife. How is she?”

“She's wonderful,” Rafferty says. “She's going to have a baby.”

“Rose,”
Wallace says, with the air of someone discovering gold. He taps the center of his forehead with his index finger, as though nailing the fact in place. “Her name is Rose. So beautiful.” He holds up a huge hand, indicating height. “
Big
. Big and beautiful.”

“She's all those things,” Rafferty says, and he suddenly wants to weep. “Smart, too.”

Hofstedler, beaming at how well Wallace is doing, raises his voice and says, “A
baby
she will have.”

“I can still hear, Leon,” Wallace says. “A boy or a girl?”

Rafferty shakes his head and realizes he's overacting for Wallace, who doesn't seem to need the extra effort. He sniffles and clears his throat. “All I know at this point is that it's going to be a baby. Or maybe two.”

Way down the bar, Campeau says, “You kidding? Two?”

“Runs in the family,” Rafferty says, pushing a perfunctory smile past the resentment he feels toward the man. “Hers, not mine.”

“You're married, you're gonna have a kid,” Wallace says slowly, his eyes scouring the bar in front of him. He pauses, his mouth open, clearly searching for something, and he nods as it arrives. “When you came here, you didn't know
anything
.”

“This is true,” Hofstedler says. “He comes to write a guidebook, and in the dark he can't find his own pocket.”

“You were my first guide, Wallace,” Poke says. “To this particular part of Bangkok, anyway. I'd never seen anything like it.”

“You sure as shit made up for it,” Campeau grumbles. “What with Rose and all.” He's never been happy that Rafferty took Rose off what he thinks of as “the market.”

“Somebody had to keep her away from people like you,” Rafferty says, trying to make it sound light.

Campeau hoists his beer and looks past it at Rafferty. “Little late for that.”

“Bob,” Rafferty says, and suddenly he's standing. “What you want to do right now is shut up.”

“Come now, come now,” Hofstedler says. He reaches across Wallace and pats the seat of Rafferty's stool, an invitation. “Everyone here is friends, yes?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says. He sits again, looks down the bar, and says, “Buddies, right, Bob?”

Campeau holds up his index and middle fingers, side by side. “Couple of fucking brothers,” he says. “And don't push that fucking jar down here, Leon.”

“Anger disrupts the adrenal system,” the Growing Younger Man observes.

Pinky Holland, safely out of the conversational line of fire in his booth, says, “Is that right?”

“Strictly speaking,” the man who might be named Ron says, “there's no such thing as the adrenal system.” He pats his hair as though making sure it's still there. “There are two adrenal
glands
, but they're part of the endocrine system.”

“
I
know that,” the Growing Younger Man says, just barely avoiding a snap. “System, my ass. The
point
is that anger can contribute to adrenal fatigue, and adrenal fatigue affects—”

“You said Varney left something for me,” Rafferty reminds Hofstedler.

“—everything, it affects everything,” the Growing Younger Man says. Then he says, with remarkable vehemence,
“System.”

“If I said that Varney left it, that is not exactly what I meant,” Hofstedler says to Poke.

“Varney is the
 . . .
the thug with the mustache?” Wallace asks. He's rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, and it makes him look exhausted. “The one who talks?”

“He is,” Hofstedler says, hoisting his stein.

“Something wrong with that man, bad wrong,” Wallace says, blinking to refocus. “I've seen him before.”

Rafferty says, “Where?” and to Hofstedler, he says, “Wait, what do you mean, that's not exactly what you meant?”

“Not this guy, not him personally,” Wallace says. “Never met him until tonight. I mean, I don't think I have.” His eyes are focused on the middle distance, looking at someone no one else can see. “But people
like
him, I've seen them before. Not many, but some.”

To Rafferty, Hofstedler says, “I mean he did not leave the envelope for you himself.” He glances at the others, as though seeking support. “He came in and talked of this and that—what was it tonight, Bob?”