The Hot Countries (13 page)

So challenge it again. Walk away right now, leaving Varney waiting to spring his surprise on no one. Just remember to keep checking your back. Take the most obscure and counterintuitive route home to your wife and child and soak yourself in the atmosphere of love, liberally seasoned with amused tolerance, that they've created for you.

And write yourself a part. Turn the monologue into a dialogue, one that Varney doesn't control. One with some surprises in it. Take some immediate precautions for those you love and for Treasure, and then kick this thing into act 2, in which Varney no longer has all the good lines.

So he does. He turns and walks away, looking back every few steps. He's not running away, he tells himself, he's making a strategic retreat. It takes him almost forty minutes and two taxicabs to get home, but when he's there, he knows he's arrived alone.
Upper-Crust Theatre
is over, the television is dark, and the people he loves most are there. He kisses both of them, eats some leftover take-out food, listens to Miaow's imitation of Alan Rickman, and goes to sleep feeling that tomorrow he'll go to work on the second act.

And in the morning he reads that a male street child has been found dead in an unused and partially burned Patpong bar, and at around ten that evening, after a day spent in a kind of stunned self-loathing, he gets a call from Leon, who says that there's a new note, and when Rafferty insists that Leon read it to him over the phone, he learns that it consists of three words:
Where is she?

Part Two

THE BANGKOK OF THE GHOSTS

13

Thai Heaven

The canal that
parallels New Petchburi Road is the worst-smelling waterway in Bangkok, a town notable for noisome canals, a vast, interlacing network of open-air sewers. The people who live beside the canals poop directly into them, and hundreds of underground pipes carry waste from the more distant and more socially elevated neighborhoods straight into these slow-flowing diversions of the Chao Phraya River. There are places where weeds grow on the water's surface, rooted in the floating night soil. Walking on Wallace's left, Ernie says, “Whoever called this place the ‘Venice of the East' was born without nostrils.”

Wallace had laughed the first time Ernie said that, as though he'd known what Ernie was talking about when in fact Wallace had no idea that anyone had ever compared Bangkok with Venice. He'd never seen Venice either; Wallace's Venice was a vague, misty, postcard vision of crumbling old buildings afloat somehow on a flat gray sea with a bunch of movie extras pushing boats along with poles and singing. A Californian's Europe, steepled with churches, stripped of color, full of foreigners, and cold.

Even though he'd heard the joke before, Wallace laughs again now. It's become automatic for him to laugh when Ernie uses that flat, uninflected voice that says,
This is nothing special,
and means he's thought of something funny. Wallace turns to say something to him, but Ernie's not there anymore, although Wallace is sure that Ernie just made a joke and that it had been Ernie, a minute or two ago, who'd first spotted the lights of Thai Heaven, where Jah is waiting.

But when Wallace looks ahead again, the lights aren't there. Nor is the smaller constellation of lights that signals Rhapsody, the bar across the way from Thai Heaven. Instead the road stretches away in front of him, a straight black line paralleled by the leaden gleam of moonlight on the thick, stinking canal water to the left. On the right side of the road, he sees the indistinct shapes of foliage. Here and there a kerosene light gleams in one of the small, wooden, stilted houses that alleviate the flatness of the riverine semi-swamp on which Bangkok is built, still dark and unbroken in this area, as empty as it would be if the nearest city were a thousand miles away. But just then the swamp shimmers and wavers for a second, and here's Ernie again beside him, but not looking the same, looking dead, which, Wallace remembers, he is; Ernie has been dead for years. And the canals have been cleaned up for years, and the swamps have been built over for years, pressed beneath the weight of skyscrapers and tunneled through for subways, but here Wallace is, walking a dark road through the swamp with the stench of the canal—the
klong
, they call it—to his left.

The moonlight on the canal breaks into circular ripples as though a stone has been thrown, although there's been no splash, and Wallace realizes that this version of New Petchburi Road—the “Golden Mile,” they call it—shouldn't be this empty: there should be other guys walking, there should be smaller bars here and there, and he should have passed Jack's American Star Bar, where the black guys hang out to the sounds of live jazz and rhythm and blues, and the girls have permed their long, straight Thai hair into Afros.

But those things are absent, and Wallace senses that the edges of this moment, of this place, are more flexible than usual, that space is twisted so that it might be a kind of Möbius loop where he'll soon come upon his own footprints in the road and then see himself up ahead, trudging away into the distance. The margins to
the right and left feel fluid and permeable, like a page off of which the
words might heedlessly run or onto which sentences from a different page, or a different book altogether, might suddenly push their way, a train wreck of meaning.

Ernie says, “It's something, ain't it, kid?” and when Wallace looks at his friend this time, it's apparent that death has almost finished with him: Ernie's uniform hangs in rotting tatters, and his face seems to have melted a bit, so that the bone beneath the skin of his forehead gleams through, smooth and white and somehow unthreatening. With the expertise of someone who has dreamed profusely since childhood, Wallace realizes he is dreaming.

Wallace spent his childhood in a nightmare-free zone, probably because the days were so benign. The ocean was right there, serving as the western margin of the small town of Carlsbad, California—a blue, sparkling margin that advanced and receded, but on a regular basis and not enough to be alarming—and the sun was a permanent fixture in the sky, supplying the gold in a color scheme that was dominated by the harmonizing blues of the sea and the sky, the white of the sand, and the eye-piercing orange of the California poppies that carpeted the hills, soft as folds of cloth, as they tumbled toward the water.

To be sure, there were monsters out there in the deep, and once in a great while something lifted sharp teeth toward Wallace's helpless feet, coming up out of the deepwater darkness of a dream. But when he woke up, he knew where he was: in a safe bed, in a safe house, in the bosom of a safe family who lived in a safe town. The real monsters were kept at bay
 . . .

. . .
waiting for him in Vietnam, where he found them all. He found them in the enemy, in his friends, in himself, in the sudden death of his comrades, and in the hell his platoon created in the villages. In the dead children, the weeping women, the small, dark-skinned men standing stunned with their hands secured behind them, waiting for the bullet.

His dreams went very, very bad during his first tour, and one night he was awakened because he was making too much noise in his sleep. The person who woke him, Ernie, taught him a secret. When the dream goes wrong, Ernie said to Wallace, swing your fist, as hard as you can, at the nearest solid object. When you don't break your hand into a hundred pieces, you'll wake up.

It took Wallace dozens of hair-whitening dreams before he remembered how to find that exit, but when he did, he learned it deeply enough that after a while he could play with the bad dreams, see how far they could take him, how unendurable they could become, before he swung at the nearest tree, the nearest wall. In Carlsbad he had ridden the mostly mannerly waves of the Pacific. Now he surfed fear in his sleep, and there was nothing mannerly about it: he was riding ten-footers, twenty-footers, tsunamis of fear, daring it to get bigger, then bigger still, and ducking out of the wave when it did.

So, trotting along a dark, unrealistically empty New Petchburi Road beside his dead friend, with a stinking
klong
to the left and a haunted swamp to the right, with the lights of Thai Heaven having disappeared in front of him, Wallace figures he's got five or six more numbers on the volume knob before it's time to bail. Remembering Ernie's question, he says, “
What's
something, Ernie?”

“All of it,” Ernie says. “The whole fucking mishmash. Every one of us who got dropped into that meat grinder, on both sides, to fight a war that never should have been fought. A million people dead, and I've met a lot of them by now, and what did we accomplish? I mean, why am I rotting here?”

“Guys in suits,” Wallace says. It had been their answer back in 'Nam.

“Dead now, most of them,” Ernie says. “Of course,
they
died on silk sheets on top of mattresses stuffed with money, or in intensive care in some hospital that was like a medical country club. But I have to tell you, Wallace, I hope some of them writhed with colon cancer, screaming in some white room while the nurses poked them for fun and told each other jokes. I hope some of them wound up pushing their swollen scrotum in a wheelbarrow, listening to people say, ‘Hey, Jack, how's the balls?' when there they were, big and bright as day, the size of watermelons, fire-engine red, and hurting like a nail through the toe.”

“Well,” Wallace says mildly. He burned through his anger long ago, but Ernie died with his at its zenith. It was what had kept him going when he was alive, it was what had sharpened the edge on the jokes. “As you said, they're dead now.”

“Fuck that,” Ernie says. “You know what? Doesn't make any difference if they're dead. No difference to the world, I mean. They're like the girls on Patpong: they're immortal, one generation replacing another so you hardly notice. The fatsos in their suits, they're always there, they always look the same. In the big offices, in the goddamn capital cities. All dressed alike, all keeping their eyes on the big cake, all with the fucking flag pins in their lapels. ‘Make money, shore up our power, by killing people? Sure. No-brainer. Next question.'”

“Look,” Wallace says. Up ahead the night thins as though water has been poured into ink, and the lights of Thai Heaven shimmer toward them. Inside, there will be music and drinks and the famous sky-blue dance floor and dozens and dozens of women, but however many women there are, he'll be looking for Jah. “Ernie,” he says, “why are you here? Just a visit?”

“A
visit
?” Ernie says. “You don't think I've got things to do?” He looks at his watch, and Wallace looks with him, seeing the skin disappear to reveal the bones of Ernie's wrist.

“Well, then,” Wallace begins.

“Remember Hartley?” Ernie says, and when Wallace, surprised at the name, looks over at him, he's Ernie again, his uniform pressed and neatly buttoned, the same expression, the one that says,
We have to find something funny about this or we won't get through it
, and Wallace hears quite clearly the last two things Ernie ever said in life, sitting thunderstruck beneath a tree with his insides spilled into his lap. He'd looked down at himself and said, “If you're going to take my picture, I need a minute.” And then he said, “Hold my hand?” and slumped sideways, and while he was still falling, he made his escape.

“Hartley,” Wallace says, pushing the memory away. “That motherfucker.”

“You just met him again,” Ernie says. “You know who he is. And you need to be careful.”

Music reaches Wallace's ears, but it's the wrong music, not the Beatles and Beach Boys and Doors songs that keep everybody dancing in Thai Heaven, but some kind of marching music, all brass and drums, trombones and tambourines. Ever since 'Nam, Wallace has thought that the phrase “military music” is a perversion of language, an evil oxymoron along the lines of “sadistic sex,” taking something that should be constructive and peaceful and chaining it to aggression and discord. He says, “The guy with the mustache.”

“Bingo,” Ernie says, and then he says again, “
. . .
ingo,” but he sounds farther off, and then, farther away still, he says, “
Ingo
, go
ing go
, go
ing to
go,” and the lights of Thai Heaven flicker and die, and Ernie's gone, and the music gets louder, and the water in the canal rises up like a wall, black and putrid, as the sky shimmers and brightens with the false dawn of exploding ordnance just over the horizon, and there's nothing for Wallace to swing his hand against, so he drops to his knees and punches the road with all his strength and sits up in bed.

The window is on the wrong side of the room
, he thinks, and then he says out loud, in a voice that's all breath, a voice that sounds like he's been kicked in the stomach, “
Ernie.
What does Varney have to do with
me
, Ernie?”

14

Showing You Who He Is

Stiff-faced, Arthit glares
at the little white card for the fourth or fifth time, turning it over again, checking the back, just as he has every time he's picked it up, as though he might have missed something there. He's wearing plastic gloves in spite of the fact that they're probably useless; half the people in the Expat Bar, plus Rafferty and Rose, have handled the damn thing. Still, he'll take it in for prints when he reports to the obscure substation to which he's been exiled.

“‘
Where is she?
'” he reads aloud, and as though on cue, there's a burst of laughter from the room that Treasure and Chalee are sharing, the room that Anna is in now, too, getting the girls ready to head over to the shelter for school. It's early Monday morning. The daytime thug, Pradya, is waiting in his car just outside, and Rafferty has prevailed on the nighttime thug, Sriyat, to follow them a couple of cars back, looking for anyone else who might be trailing along, and do a quick check of the shelter's neighborhood before he goes home to bed.

Arthit glances at his watch. “They should be on their way. It's getting late.”

“Class won't start until Anna gets there.”

“It's
Father Bill
,” Arthit says, and there's an edge to it. “We're on tiptoe, trying to show him how dot-the-i's we can be.”

They're at the dining-room table, the fish traps pushed to a corner to make room for the papers that Arthit brought home from the station on Sunday evening and spread all over the surface. Anna and the girls had eaten breakfast in the kitchen, and
the strain among them seems to have thawed somewhat, because the
girls had chattered and Anna had joined in, and every now and then they'd dissolved into giggles. Rafferty can only imagine how hard Anna must be working to keep up with the kids' words. “Father Bill has a lot on his plate,” he says.

“He's a saint,” Arthit says, raising both palms to rebuff the implication that he'd meant anything negative about Father Bill. “I have no idea how he does what he does. I've only got
two
of them here, and it's all I can—” He breaks off and smiles, a bit overbrightly, at someone behind Rafferty.

“We're ready to go,” Anna says, coming in from the living room, dressed in the slightly official-looking dark slacks and blouse that constitute her teaching uniform. She widens her eyes as a call for attention and holds up one of her blue cards, on which she's written,
Say something about their clothes
. Then she says, out loud to Poke, “We all went shopping last night after you left. Your big friend followed us.”

Arthit says, “He fit right in, especially in the girls' clothing stores.”

The girls file into the room. Treasure seems barely to be present—she's pulled back, Poke thinks, into the protective shell she wore at her father's. Chalee is aglow with pride, but behind it Rafferty senses a kind of frazzled desperation. Wearing a big smile, she looks rapidly from one of them to the other, never pausing to hold anyone's gaze, and then lowers her eyes to the clutter of paper on top of the table as though she expects to find something about herself there.

“Don't you both look nice,” Arthit says, sounding like someone who's rehearsed the line a hundred times and is finally saying it in front of an audience and knows he's getting it wrong.

“Don't they?” Anna says after a moment's silence. The girls' clothes are so new that Rafferty can practically hear them squeak.

“Let me guess,” he says, diving in. “You two switched your shirts.”

Chalee gives an enormous blink, but Treasure's gaze is steady, and she turns her head a few inches to regard him from the corners of her eyes. Chalee says, “How did you
know
?”

“I see all those orange ruffles on Treasure's
 . . .
uh, blouse and I think
Chalee
. I see the little blue anchor on the pocket of yours and I think
Treasure
.”

Looking at her feet, Chalee says, “I never went to a store before. I think I picked out things that were too fancy.” Her face is red. “When I see Treasure wearing that blouse—”

“It's a beautiful blouse,” Treasure says. She glances at Rafferty and instantly away again, then clears her throat. “I talked you into letting me wear it.”

“
All
my stuff looks like that,” Chalee says despairingly. “Like they're in a cartoon. When I look at Treasure's clothes—”

“You chose lovely things, Chalee,” Anna says. She's kept her eyes on Chalee's lips as the girls spoke. “But if you want to trade them, we can go back this afternoon.”

“I want clothes like Treasure's,” Chalee says.

“Well, I'm keeping this,” Treasure says. She tugs at a random ruffle. “I like it.”

“Let's go, let's go,” Anna says. “We're going to be late.” She shoos the girls out of the room.

“How did you know that?” Arthit asks. It's half whisper, half hiss.

“I didn't. I just guessed. That blouse was a poor kid's idea of fancy. But if I'd been wrong, they both would have jumped all over me, and they'd have liked it even better. Kids love to be right.”

“It pisses me off that you know how to talk to them,” Arthit says. “I say hello, and I feel like I'm doing an interrogation.”

“Arthit. I've had
seven years
of Miaow. It took me a year to get anything out of her except yes and no.”

Arthit lifts a hand and focuses on the table in front of him, clearly listening. In less than a minute, the front door opens. “Goodbye!” Anna calls, and then the door closes again.

Rafferty says, “Classy gesture on Treasure's part, trading blouses or shirts or whatever they are.”

“They're like sisters, and that's both good and bad,” Arthit says. “I already doubt that I'm up to it. Treasure, I mean. She works so hard to seem confident, on top of things. But she jumps whenever there's a loud noise, and last night she had a bad dream, woke up screaming, and wet the bed. It took Anna an hour to calm her down, and then she climbed into bed with Chalee.” He rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, his eyes squeezed shut. “I'm not supposed to know that happened. I didn't dare go into the room with Anna.”

“It's who she is, Arthit. Actually, I think she's behaving pretty well, considering what her father put her through. And it's not going away anytime soon.”

“When you first took Miaow in—” Arthit begins.

“Not the same. Miaow was very complicated, and she didn't trust either of us, but the street had made her
 . . .
I guess the term is ‘self-sufficient.' On a practical level, she could take care of herself, dress herself, feed herself, defend herself within reason. I think it was a year before she said thank you for anything. Emotionally, she was a wreck. No one had ever loved her. Her parents weren't even a dim memory. But Treasure had it even worse. There were two people who were
supposed
to love her. But her father beat her, terrified her, treated her like a ventriloquist's doll, and her mother hid in bottles of whiskey and codeine, so loaded she had a maid whose main job was to make sure she didn't burn the house down. So Treasure's problems are, maybe, deeper than Miaow's were.”

Arthit says, “But look at Miaow now.”

“Rose has been pouring love into her for years. And Anna will do the same for Treasure, and eventually, or at least possibly, if everything goes right and everybody's karma is good, it'll bring about a miracle. You don't have to take the lead. In fact, you shouldn't get anywhere near her physically until she comes to you. Essentially, you can do what I did—hide behind your wife during the really rough periods and then come out and be cool when the kid's put herself part of the way back together.”

“Even if that would work, which I doubt,” Arthit says, “I've never been good with kids. And I have no idea how to be cool.”

Rafferty raps his knuckles on the table. “Then let me ask you the big one. If she stays, do you think you could learn to love her?”

After a silent moment, Arthit says, “Ah.”

“Yes,” Rafferty says. “That's pretty much it.”

“But
 . . .
” Arthit says. He takes a deep breath, makes a big, popping
P
as he blows it out, and moves some papers around in front of him. “Even if I can, how am I supposed to show it?”

“You just feel it. If you do feel it. And when you discover that you do, focus on it and let it fill you up, because it will. Believe me, she'll notice.”

Arthit shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “I see.”

“Arthit—do you
want
to do this?”

He takes a stack of papers, squares them, and raps the stack's edge against the table. “Anna does.”

“That's not the same—”

“She misses her son so desperately,” Arthit says. “And that human hangnail she was married to won't let her see him.”

“Treasure is
not
Anna's son,” Rafferty says. He pushes himself away from the table and thinks for a moment about how to frame what he wants to say. “Look, I don't usually give advice, but when you've got a kid who doesn't know who she is, it's not a good idea to wish she was someone else.”

“You want to know the truth?” Arthit says. “The whole thing scares me to death.”

Rafferty gets up and picks up both of their coffee cups. As he goes through the kitchen door, he says, over his shoulder, “Good. It should.”

Pouring the coffee, he hears Arthit say hopelessly, “And then there's Chalee. What
are
we going to do with Chalee?”

“Varney wanted us to find the boy fast,” Arthit says. “He wanted to get the message out.” He's sitting straight now, in his professional posture, and he's been organizing the documents into rows. Looking at the sheet squarely in front of him, he says, “Foodland manager got a call around three twenty Sunday morning, maybe four hours after you left, saying there was a fire in the closed bar, the Suction Cup, I think it used to be.”

“Male or female?”

“Female. Thai. ‘The bar next to you is on fire.'
Then a hang up
.
There's only one bar that shares a wall with the market, so the manager ran down the alley to
 . . .
to whatever it was.”

“What it was, was a pit.”

“And sure enough the door's ajar and there's smoke pouring out. So he kicks it the rest of the way open, the manager does, and finds two big wastebaskets on fire, filled with compressed trash, just restaurant and supermarket litter—bags, food cartons, torn-up cardboard boxes, stuff like that, but really pushed down, like an adult had stepped on it.”

“To keep it burning longer,” Rafferty says.

“The room was almost empty—just a few tables and broken chairs and the bar. The boy was in plain sight, on top of the bar.” He takes a deep breath. “His neck had been broken.”

“So he died fast.”

“Yeah.” Arthit scrubs at his mouth with an open hand, as though trying to scour away a bad taste. “I'm sure it was terrifying, but it was quick.”

“But, you know, I'd been thinking that Varney killed the kid because he was angry. Because I hadn't shown up, I mean. He was furious, and he took it out on the kid. But—” He clears his throat. “But four hours later? I could see it if he'd done it right away, in a rage, but—”

Arthit says, “But he didn't.”

“Are you sure? Maybe he killed the kid and then sat there for a while, trying to figure out what to do next.”

“No,” Arthit says. “Body temperature was too high. Almost normal. The boy died less than an hour before we got there.”

“So he took his time, keeping the kid there, maybe to let the streets clear so people wouldn't see him leave, and then he killed him,” Rafferty says.

Arthit says, “In cold blood. And then he called attention to it. You know where this is going.”

Rafferty feels as though his coffee might come back up. “I do.”

“You didn't come when he wanted you to, and he
thought
you might not, and he had an alternative plan in place.” Arthit pushes his chair away slightly, measuring Poke's reaction. “He's showing you who he is.”

“Yeah.” Rafferty finds he needs the chair's back, and he slumps against it. “The note he sent me Saturday night said I was going to learn what he meant by ‘or what.'”

“Maybe just the beginning,” Arthit says.

“He's telling me he's willing to murder a child to get my attention. A
street child
, and I'll bet you anything you want that he knows that my daughter used to be a street child. Showing me his fucking credentials. And if I don't give him what he wants, there'll be more.”