The Hot Countries (12 page)

“I don't care what he talked about,” Rafferty says. “Just tell me where the envelope—”

“I
am
telling you,” Hofstedler says. “I think it is all one piece. Astronomy, he was talking about astronomy, about how something with great gravity can bend space into a
 . . .
a—”

“A lens,” the Growing Younger Man supplies.

“Just so.” Hofstedler nods slowly, as though it requires an effort, and frames a large circle in the air with both hands. “A lens. A curve of space like one in glass, so that light, when it passes through this space, is bent. Imagine this, space curving.”

“For Christ's sake, Leon,” Wallace says, coming back into the room from wherever he's been, “tell him about the envelope.”

“So he talks,” Hofstedler says, as though Wallace were in a soundproof booth. “But all the time he talks, I think he is looking for you. Waiting for you.”

“That's right, come to think of it,” the Growing Younger Man says. “He kept staring at the door.”

“Guy's got balls made of brass,” Campeau says. “Last time he was in here, we practically kicked him into the street, but he comes in tonight like we were his fucking fan club and just starts talking again, but you know what, Poke? They're right. He was waiting.”

“Yes,” Leon says. “He talks and talks, and finally he says, ‘Is Rafferty coming?'”

Rafferty says, “He did, did he?”

“And I say I am not in charge of your schedule, maybe tonight you stay home, and then he asks where you live.”

“And you said?”

Hofstedler gives him both hands, palms up, Delsarte for
How would I know?
“I said I have no idea, yes? Nobody here knows where you live. We are friends, but we do not go home with you.”

“What did he say when you told him you didn't know where I lived?”

“Something about the red shift,” maybe-Ron says. “How a gravitational lens can distort the red shift.”

Rafferty says, “The red shift.”

“He said the red shift is how we know which things in the universe are close and which are far away. He said it was very important to know what was close and what was far away.”

“And whether it's coming toward you or going in the other direction,” the Growing Younger Man says.

“Listen to me,” Wallace says, breaking in. He blinks heavily a few times, and Rafferty thinks he might have lost the thread, but Wallace says, “It was his
tone
. When you've lived with violent men, you learn to listen to tone. He was being personal.”

Hofstedler says, “This is why I was telling you what he—”

“Until then he'd been bullshitting,” Wallace says, “but this was different. That thing about needing to know what was close and what was far away, that was a threat.”

“Yes,” Hofstedler says. “He said if something is coming toward you, you need to know how far away it is and how fast it is coming. So you can get ready for it—is this not right?” He doesn't wait for an answer. “Then he said, ‘Tell Poke I'm sorry I missed him,' and he left.”

Poke says, “The
envelope
.”

“Yes, yes.” Hofstedler reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out the kind of envelope that might hold a greeting card. “Two minutes after Varney
went out, that child, the same one from before, came back in and put this on the bar and went away again. So you see, he didn't exactly give it to you, but—”

“Got it, Leon.” The envelope says
Philip Rafferty
on it in an expert calligraphic script, done freehand in black ink. Unlike the first envelope, which had been soaked through, this one is almost completely dry, just one circular splotch from a raindrop that hit dead center in the curve of the capital
R
that begins Rafferty's last name, diluting the ink to create a dark circle, a little like a bullet hole.

Rafferty slides a thumb beneath the edge of the flap and pops it open. It's a commercial card for a person who's suffered the loss of someone close, and on the front is a photograph of gently rolling green hills with a fading sunset in the distance, all seen through a tidy, somewhat fussy typeface that says,
With Sympathy
.

Wallace, looking over Rafferty's shoulder, says, “Somebody dead?”

“My guess is, not yet,” Rafferty says, unfolding the card. There's no preprinted message inside, but three lines have been handwritten there, in careful, even precise, block letters. It says:

 

you're probably wondering,

or what?

coming right up.

 

“What the hell does that mean?” Wallace says.

“It means he wants something from me, and there will be consequences if I don't give it to him,” Rafferty says. He's keeping his voice level, trying for an easy tone, but he feels as if something
very large has squeezed itself into his chest, its knees folded against his lungs. He closes the card, putting a lot of effort into keeping his hands steady, and tries three times to slide it into the envelope before he succeeds. He feels Wallace's attention on him and turns to see the old man watching the care with which he's closing the flap. Wallace's face is so empty he might be sitting alone in the dark.

“Wallace,” Rafferty says, “you said you'd known people like Varney before. Who were they?”

He has the feeling the question has to travel a considerable distance before it reaches the part of Wallace's mind where the answer is stored. Wallace takes a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them, he says, “Guy's a back-shooter.” He puts a straight index finger on the bar and draws it slowly toward himself like someone tracing a trail on a map. “If he'd been in my squad,” he says, turning the line into an arc, “I would have led him straight into a minefield.” All five fingers snap up from the bar's surface, and he says,
“Boom.”
His eyes come up to Poke's, and there's no question that a much younger Wallace is looking out through them. He says, “Never let him get behind you. Never.”

12

He Does Not Share the Stage Well

Rose and Miaow
will hav
e absorbed their two hours of the dreadful Reverend Slope and
Barchester Towers
by now, and Rafferty wants their company as intensely as he can remember ever wanting anything; he needs them to help him shrug off the anxiety that's wrapped itself around his chest. So he begs off Leon's request to help him take Wallace home, promising to do it next time, even as Wallace dismisses the idea, saying Poke will be no help getting him home, since he barely knows Bangkok at all.

“Yes, but the parts Poke
does
know are the Bangkok we now live in,” Hofstedler says. “You, you know the Bangkok of the ghosts.”

Wallace pushes his stool back from the bar and says, “Some of my best friends are ghosts.”

“Well, Rose would say you should be nice to them,” Rafferty says, getting up. “If you've managed to get on a ghost's good side, you want to stay there.”

“Ghosts are the only people who can still make me laugh,” Wallace says. “You got my leash, Leon?”

“You are joking,” Leon says. “I go with you because I enjoy your company.”

In the end Rafferty's guilty conscience compels him to wait the long moments it takes Leon and Wallace to organize themselves and get through the door. As he walks them onto the sidewalk, he can't help noticing that Hofstedler keeps a pinch of Wallace's sleeve firmly between his thumb and forefinger.

They stand under the bar's meager awning, looking through a sparse sparkle of rain at the activity in the street. “Remember,” Wallace says, “when they put the night market in and that old guy Trink went on and on in the newspaper about how thousands of people would be burned to death if the government didn't listen to him and knock the whole thing down?”

“Old guy,” Hofstedler says. “He was old when I got here, and he's still alive.”

It was before Poke's time, but he knows about Bernard Trink, a diminutive Belgian who wrote, for years, a sort of sex-trade roundup in the
Bangkok Post
each Friday, complete with snaps of particularly lissome “demimondaines” and tips about which bars were allowing the dancers to “show.” The guys in the Expat Bar called the column “The Tart Mart.” Eventually an epidemic of politically correct sanity broke out among the
Post
editorial staff, and Trink was put on book reviews.

Wallace says, “And that fucking Dinty Moore beef stew.” To Poke he says, “He's in the country with the world's greatest food, and the guy could
not
get enough Dinty Moore canned stew. Wrote about it all the time: ‘Foodland is no longer selling Dinty Moore beef stew
.
'” He's smiling broadly, and he looks more like the man Poke first knew. “Town was a lot funnier back then,” Wallace says, and the three of them let a moment pass in silence as the crowd parades by.

Poke is about to say goodbye when Hofstedler clears his throat and says, “Look at them. They think it was invented for them.”

“They're young,” Wallace says, watching the men in the rain. “They can have it.” He turns and registers Poke standing there. Confusion clouds his face, and Poke realizes that Wallace has forgotten who he is. Poke gives him a parting smile anyway, and Wallace surprises him by snatching his arm away from Hofstedler's pinch and throwing it around Poke's shoulder. Wallace is a few inches taller than Poke, so Poke has to look up at him to see that Wallace has recognized him again and is smiling. “You grew up good, kid,” Wallace says. “Give my love to your wife, to Jah—” He shakes his head as though something has gone loose inside. “Not Jah,
Rose
, to Rose.”

“Will do,” Rafferty says, knowing he won't. He's not going to have
that
conversation again.

“Beautiful girl,” Wallace says. He gazes past Poke, at the street. “So many beautiful girls.”

Hofstedler and Wallace are barely out of sight when Poke's eye is caught by rapid movement to his left. He freezes midstep, seeing people scatter as the small boy with the dreadful buzz cut shoves his way through the crowd, breaking into a full-out run, slowing slightly when he sees Rafferty and then picking up his pace as though one of the more persuasive Buddhist hells has yawned open and its demons are right behind him. Rafferty ducks behind a pair of slow-moving drunks, thinking,
Could be Varney chasing him
, but when no pursuer materializes from the crowd in pursuit, he does one fast, final survey and takes off after the kid.

It's too crowded for him to run, but he can track the boy by the trail of pissed-off drunks and the occasional off-balance woman, the second of whom is sitting on the pavement surrounded by the scatterings of a very full purse and swearing a sort of Ingmar Bergman stream of Swedish syllables. A bit farther on, he pushes past a slight young man in shorts who's making a disproportionate fuss about a skinned knee.

The Patpong area is shaped like a capital H, with the two uprights of Patpongs 1 and 2 bisected in the middle by the cross street, which runs through a gap in the night-market booths. The cross street is to Rafferty's right, and the relative disorganization of the crowd in that direction pulls him
in.

As he emerges from the area between the booths, the neon of the Queen's Corner gleams to his left. A pair of ladyboys from the Betty end of the spectrum stand at the entrance with open umbrellas, smoking like a couple of jazz drummers and halfheartedly trying to wave a few customers in from the rain. Directly in front of Rafferty, the short stretch of pavement leading from Patpong 1 to 2 is relatively empty. To his right and left, Patpong 1 is jammed, but whatever groove the boy might have cut through the crowd has had time to close itself behind him, or else the boy went straight across, toward Patpong 2.

“A kid?” he calls in Thai to the ladyboys in front of the King's Corner. One of them makes a little hitchhiking gesture with her right thumb, directing him toward Patpong 2. He waves thanks and starts to run again, then thinks better of it and slows to a brisk walk.

Among the inbred cluster of Bangkok's “adult entertainment” districts, Patpong 2 is the cousin nobody likes, the family member who gets the room without the window. It's right there, just a few dour meters from Patpong 1—which, while it's decades beyond its rancid peak, continues to attract throngs of gawkers who don't know any better. Still, Patpong 2 is a marathon dud, even though it shares the Patpong name and offers the same shopworn attractions, plus an assortment of spuriously upscale “cocktail lounges,” where wannabe executive punters sit at tables, drink hard liquor, and hit on the waitresses, who have shown up solely to be hit on. There's also an all-boy go-go bar that seems to have wandered several blocks down Surawong from the gay stretch that's blossomed there in the past eight to ten years, known as “Soi Katoey” in honor of the ladyboys who decorate it each evening. Other than these minor variations, the family resemblance to Patpong 1 is marked.

But no one comes to visit. There's one person here for every fifteen on the other street. From where he stands, Rafferty can see both left and right almost to the intersection at each end, and there's no kid with a bad haircut. The rain has thoughtfully lightened, so visibility is good. He steps up on the sidewalk, and, hearing Wallace say “back-shooter,” he peers through the plate- glass window of the cocktail lounge on the corner before he leans his back against it as he reviews how he got here and what might be next.

The boy had been running, but no one had seemed to be chasing him. So, two possibilities. First, whoever was pursuing the boy—for argument's sake, let's say it was Varney—had seen Rafferty and stopped, melting into the crowd. Second, of course—and it's suddenly so obvious it feels like a whole tray of ice cubes poured down his back—there may have been no one at all after the boy. He may have been sent to draw Rafferty out, may have been running solely to
get
Rafferty to follow
him—maybe to Varney—and Rafferty has, brainlessly, fallen for it. That means that Varney, or whatever surprise Varney might have arranged, is in front of Rafferty, not behind him.

Perhaps the surprise is an explanation of what Varney means by “Or what.”

It feels like a ripe moment to stand still. Wallace, he suddenly thinks, probably knew how to size up the most logical spots for ambushes, trip wires, and punji pits in a jungle. Rafferty believes he's developed an equivalent eye for the streets of Bangkok. This seems like an appropriate time to put it to work.

To his left is a row of outdoor bars, just pink-lighted tables sharing a single long, thick, dripping concrete roof, from which hang a few flat-screen TVs tuned perpetually to the soccer game of the moment. Rafferty has come to the conclusion that there's a soccer game being televised somewhere in the world at every second of every day of the year and that Bangkok sits at the very bottom of a kind of digital valley, down into which every single one of these games rolls, ripe for television. On the far side of the outdoor bars is the sidewalk, and on the far side of the sidewalk are the doors to the indoor bars. The kid isn't visible in the outdoor bars, and he wouldn't be allowed into the indoor ones. With his back comfortably pressed against the solidity of the cocktail lounge, Rafferty studies this nocturnal little cityscape until he's reasonably certain he can discount it as suitable to Varney's purposes.

Just to the left is the first of the indoor bars, the infamous Star of Light, whose slogan could be “Decades of Oral Satisfaction
.
”
Movement catches his eye, and he sees a woman in the black clothes favored by the bar's specialists leaning against the wall with an expression that suggests she's projecting her personal movies onto the rain. She catches his eye for a second, sees nothing to engage her attention, and returns to her reverie. No one else is visible in the stretch of street beyond her. So scratch the left.

To the right are a couple of cocktail lounges like the one he's leaning on and a massage parlor, and then there's a slight elbow curve that leads the last twenty or thirty meters to Silom. There's some kind of fetish club there, beneath a big sign that says, helpfully,
fetish club
, although Rafferty has never been able to imagine what kinds of fetishes are so trivial or so wholesome that their practitioners would walk boldly under that sign and through the door. He thinks it's probably people who don't alphabetize their bookshelves or intentionally wear mismatched socks and want to be mildly reprimanded. Beyond the fetish club are a couple of stores selling cheap luggage that are open until 2
a.m.
, and beyond those is the busy sidewalk of Silom. He figures he can dismiss the street to the right, too.

So that leaves the area more or less directly across the street.

It's a teensy bit of middle-class life, a snippet of Pleasantville dropped into Gomorrah: two respectable-looking restaurants and a big, shiny supermarket, a Foodland, bright enough inside for a person to get a fluorescent tan. It's so pragmatically Thai, he thinks: towing the kids past the Fetish Club, the Star of Light, and two or three more of the most disreputable bars on the Asian continent to buy them a Tootsie Pop in Foodland. Look, kids, here's
this
part of life,
that
part of life, and here's your Tootsie Pop, and when you grow up, you'll have to decide which door to go through, so pay attention.

Foodland and the restaurants, he believes, can also be struck from the list of the likely destinations Varney might have chosen to explain the specific nature of his
“or what?”
—perhaps accompanied by a short, painful, and memorable teaching aid.

Rafferty feels like he's been here too long.

What remains, when the right, the left, and most of the area across the street have been eliminated, is the thing he hasn't wanted
to think about: a narrow, dreary alley in between the restaurants and Foodland, a little dead end with a curve to it that leads perhaps ten meters to a door, once the entry point to a dodgy girlie bar that seemed to change its name every few weeks and took advantage of the alley's length to provide enough time so the patrons could stow
the dope and the women could get up off their knees and wipe their chins, before the cops came in. The space is empty now, and, Rafferty thinks, one way God could demonstrate his or her existence would be for it to remain empty until the end of time.

Surely Varney can't think Rafferty is stupid enough to enter that alley in pursuit of the running boy moments after getting a message about “or what.”

Well, how stupid
is
he? Stupid enough to come this far.

Varney is selectively capable, Rafferty thinks. Probably much more dangerous in a small, dark space than Rafferty is, especially since, as Treasure says, he can't be hurt. But he's got one obvious drawback: he talks, but he doesn't listen. And then Rafferty hears one of Miaow's acting terms:
monologue
.

Varney is a monologist. He does not share the stage well. The entire relationship between the two of them has, so far, been a monologue with Varney getting all the lines, setting the parameters, and calling the shots. It's been a bravura performance in bits and pieces, and it's been allowed to flow largely unchallenged. And when Rafferty
had
challenged it, in the silliest possible way, with the Halmahera Sea, Varney hadn't liked it at all.