The Hot Countries (16 page)

17

That Travesty on Her Face

Varney's not going
back to the Expat Bar, Rafferty is sure of it. Not after the boy's death. If Patpong is to be the meeting ground, Rafferty needs to find a place to hang his big fat face out in plain sight, at least until Arthit comes up with the hotel that Varney is hiding in.
If
he's using the passport with that name on it.

So: someplace Rafferty will be conspicuous. That narrows it down to several restaurants divided between Patpong 1 and 2. What they have in common is bright lights inside and big windows through which he'll be visible from the street. Varney will probably be more comfortable if the place is busy, a lot of people going in and out, competing for the attention of the staff. There are four possibles.

One of them is the RiffRaff, right at the top of Patpong. In addition to having a nice big window, the RiffRaff also serves decent food, if you stick with the Thai entrées the employees eat, and the thought makes Rafferty realize that he's hungry.

Late afternoon has dragged itself in, surprisingly sunny but with a gray slant of rain visible a mile or so away. The country boys who assemble the night market are shirtless in anticipation of the downpour as they fire up their forklifts and ferry up and down the street toting stacks of plywood and the lengths of steel pipe they'll turn into frames for the booths. Rose is at home, waiting for
Miaow to finish packing for the Imperial, the hotel Rose liked. Five seconds prone on the bed in the suite they had chosen was a life-changing experience for her, making Rafferty's sagging old double feel like a field of stones by comparison. The Imperial, he thinks, could be an expensive proposition. After Miaow's finished, the day guy, Pradya, will drive them to the hotel and bribe the staff to let him claim a space where he can watch the front until he's needed or until he's replaced by Sriyat.

Rafferty pushes the RiffRaff's door open and walks into a wall of air-conditioning. The staff greets him with big, welcoming smiles. This was where he usually ate when he was roughing out his book, back in the days of early confusion, before Wallace came to his rescue. Most evenings he sat with his laptop at the window table, taking in the nightly transformation of a drab little street into a tarnished peacock, flashing its off-color feathers in a commercial mating display. He'd watched the night market blink into life beneath its dirty fluorescents as the sidewalks filled up with the voluntary homeless of all continents, their bonds cut, their promises forgotten, their common sense abandoned, looking dazzled to be in a no-rules zone where love, if not exactly free, was at least inexpensive and without apparent consequences.

In and out
, in all senses of the expression, no harm, no foul. Except perhaps for the women, and anyway they seemed to have no real lives outside the bars, even though they could be surprisingly human in the morning. Still, look at 'em, they smile all the time (
everybody
smiles all the time), and they're probably doing better than they were in whatever dirt-road, dog-shit-spattered slum they'd escaped. They're doing okay, and if they aren't
 . . .
well, whose fault is that anyway? Plane leaves in a few days, back to the real world, where the women, inconvenient though it might be at times, lead actual lives. And this isn't really a city, it's a theme park. Everybody's acting, everybody's fine. That's why they smile, isn't it?

The waitress rattles gossip at him in Thai—this cook was stabbed by his girlfriend, that waitress's daughter got into college—and leads him to his customary window, the window through which, all those years ago, he'd first seen Miaow. He'd had his laptop open as he tried to find his way to a sentence he could believe, until he felt a presence and realized he was separated by about eighteen inches and a pane of glass from a very dirty little girl with severely parted, tightly pulled-back hair. The first thing that struck him, aside from the filthiness of her T-shirt, was the rigid control in her face: tight mouth, furrowed brow, betrayed eyes, an expression most people don't acquire until their beaten-down forties. A shallow wooden crate hung from a strap that ran behind her neck and obviously cut into her skin. The crate was full of chewing gum. She'd tilted it against the window, letting the glass take some of the weight.

He smiled at her and realized she was paying no attention to him at all. She'd been drawn by the glow of the laptop. He gave up on his sentence and swiveled the laptop toward her so she could see the screen better. Her eyes widened and came up to his, and then she backed away and took off at a run. She'd returned half an hour later, though, and then the next night and the night after, hypnotized by the luminous screen.

Now, of course—now that she's one of the two people he loves most in the world, now that she's played Ariel in
The Tempest
and is about to play Julie in
Small Town
and learned English and had her heart broken by a boy and replaced the boy with Benedict Cumberbatch and the entire British national repertory company—
now
he knows that she came back because that's who she is: she comes back for what she wants until she gets it. On the fourth or fifth night, he'd persuaded her, via Delsarte-style signs through the glass, to come in, and he'd bought her a Coke, which was all she wanted. Then he'd set up a game of pinball on the computer and abandoned her for half an hour after telling the staff she could have anything on the menu. When he came back from his stroll, the Coke was half drunk, the score on the screen was astronomical, and there were three packs of gum—all different flavors, just in case—stacked neatly on his plate.

That was a little less than seven years ago.

This street
, he thinks. As wretched as it is, it gave him the two people he cares about, it gave him the only real home of his life.

He sees the first few bar girls of the evening, the early birds, filtering through the crowd, chattering like actual birds and flirting for practice. Rose and Miaow should be on their way to the Imperial by now, to the ridiculously expensive suite. Rose had been the most beautiful of all these young women once, the queen of Patpong, when he met her.

Looking at the bar workers, he realizes what he hasn't been thinking about: the woman with the birthmark. As he reaches for his phone to remind Arthit, it rings. And it's Arthit.

“I need you to meet me,” Arthit says.

“Where?” Without waiting for an answer, Rafferty says, “That bar girl with the—”

“That's it,” Arthit says. “I need you to identify her.”

“Oh,” Rafferty says. Then a huge amount of air forces its way out of him, and he squeezes his eyes closed and says, “Oh,
no
.”

“You have something to write with?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He wants very badly to break something.

“It's pretty awful,” Arthit says. He gives Rafferty an address. “Have you eaten?”

“Not yet.”

Arthit says, “Probably for the better.” A moment goes by, and he adds, “And I'm pretty sure he left a message for you.”

Rafferty's up, miming writing on the air to tell the restaurant staff he needs his check, even though the food hasn't come. “What is it?”

“You need to see it.”

The first things
he sees, around Arthit, who's in front of him, are the fingers of her right hand, which are curved as peacefully as those of someone who's sleeping, But then Arthit steps aside, and he sees the rest of it: the blood on the bed, the garishly ornamented face. Against the rust-brown pool that surrounds her, and against the crude, mocking scrawls of makeup on her lips and eyes, the skin of her face is startlingly, angelically, white. Her birthmark, unsoftened by foundation, brings to Rafferty's mind the awful, fraudulent color of the grape-jelly handprints.

She had not put the cartoonish makeup on. Rafferty had seen her
real
makeup, and while it had been thick, it was artfully done. This was
slashed
on, crookedly and maliciously: big, uneven scarlet lips, hard-edged spots of rouge on her cheekbones, eyelashes drawn with an eyebrow pencil, so long they go straight through her eyebrows to her forehead and down her cheeks to her chin.

“It's her,” he says. He swallows hard and turns away, feeling a rush of heat in his face and seeing gnats swarming the air in front of his eyes. He says, “And I'm going to kill him.”

“I understand the feeling.” Arthit takes Poke's arm and leads him from the tiny apartment, just a cement floor, a thin mattress, a limp little bouquet wilting in a glass jar on the floor near the pillows. On the wall hang a couple of birthday cards, a careful braid of cheap gift-wrap ribbons, and pictures of the girl taken years ago, her face village-girl clean, her smile broad and eager. The hand raised in each photo to cover her cheek might have looked coy if you hadn't already seen the birthmark. Happy forever, she's flanked by girls, probably the friends who young people think will be with them forever.

At the door Rafferty stops. People have gathered at one end of the hall, held back by two uniformed cops. The tenants, if that's what they are, are silent and curious. Some of the women give the flint-beneath-the-skin impression that says they might be bar workers or some other kind of pro. A crime-scene officer pushes past Arthit into the apartment with a curious glance at Rafferty's face and closes the door behind him. “The fucker spent the night with her,” Rafferty says.

“Shhhh. They don't yet know, at least officially, that there's been a death,” Arthit whispers. “The landlord asked us to soft-pedal it. Half of them will move out to avoid the ghost.” He leads Rafferty down the hall, away from the onlookers. When they're a few yards farther away, Arthit says, “Why? Why do you say he spent the night?”

“Her face. Under that makeup her face was absolutely clean. Rose told me that when she was working, last thing she did every night was wash her face, and I mean she really scrubbed
it, washing off the whole night and everything that went with it.
This girl was sensitive about that birthmark, she's covering it in her pictures. She went to work already made up. If he'd knocked on the door in the morning, she would have at least slapped on some powder or something before she let him in. No, he was here last night, when she washed her face. She knew him well enough to let him see her without the makeup, to let him see the birthmark. He probably told her he liked the birthmark, that
 . . .
that she was—” His throat seems to have closed, and he clears it forcefully and says, “He probably said she was beautiful.” He kicks the corridor wall. “The sick fucker spent the night with her, made love to her, and then did
that
. And left me that message.”

“I haven't shown you the message—” Arthit begins.

“The
makeup
. He turned her into a parody of a bar girl. Making sure I'd understand. He was killing Rose, metaphorically, same way he was killing Miaow when he murdered that street child. Didn't want me to miss the parallel, so he does that
 . . .
that travesty on her face.” He feels his voice thickening and forces himself to breathe and then swallow, but it doesn't help. “
Jesus
, Arthit, she was just a harmless young woman. She
 . . .
she didn't think she was pretty, and she was self-conscious about it—she curled her hair, probably for hours every day, she tried to hide that mark on her cheek.” He realizes he's pressed his hand to his own cheek and lowers it. “You know, she did what she had to do, day in and day out, not hurting anyone, just waiting or hoping for something good to happen. God
damn
him.”

“I agree, I agree.” Arthit is patting Poke's shoulder. “It's terrible.”

“I need to see my wife,” Rafferty says.

“First you have to look at something. It was clearly left for you.”

“What?”

“The
message
.” Arthit turns, gives the group of people at the other end of the short hall a brief, businesslike smile, and goes back to the apartment door. He knocks once, and when the door is opened, he says a few words and is handed a brown paper bag. Tucking the bag under his arm, he returns to Rafferty, pulling on latex gloves. With his back to the onlookers, he opens the bag and pulls out a bloodied copy of Rafferty's book
Looking for Trouble in Thailand
.
Rafferty reaches for it, but Arthit pulls it away and shakes his head.

“I think it's extremely unlikely that this belonged to her,” Arthit says. “He left it underneath her so we'd find it.”

“Did he write something in it?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Arthit opens the book, and Rafferty sees the piece of thicker paper—like an index card but bigger—that's just barely sticking out of the top edge of the pages. Arthit tugs it out and turns it to him. “What does this mean to you?”

Rafferty looks down at it and feels himself squint. The card is blank except for three numbers and two symbols. It's obviously another laserjet or inkjet printout; no one could ink them in so evenly by hand.