The Hot Countries (23 page)

He didn't know what he was going to do until he'd done it: brought his hands straight up, fists clenched, under the bottom of the box. The food flew into the air, some of it hitting Jah in the chest and face. A big cardboard cup of hot soup struck her on the shoulder and exploded, soaking her in steaming broth and noodles. The box tumbled through the air, end over end, and bounced off the wall over their bed.

He slapped her, backhanded her, and she staggered backward until her shoulder hit the edge of the open doorway. Within the time it took her to blink twice, she made her decision. Without pause, without a parting glace, she took the couple of additional steps she needed to go all the way through the door, and he stood there, numb, almost choking on the fragrance of the food, listening to her footsteps on the stairs as she fled into the Bangkok day. The box was upside down on top of their pillow.

Slowly and meticulously, he cleaned the room. When he was finished, when the floor was washed and the linen on the bed changed and the pillow hung up to air and the box and cartons and cups of food thrown away, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the door. By seven o'clock that night, he knew she wasn't coming back.

He sat there for another hour, using the time to scrape at himself, to pick at his life, hating what he saw. A little after eight, he took the small wad of bills that had been in the cardboard box and tore them to tiny bits, scattering the pieces over the bed. He pulled the petals off the fading orchid and mixed the bright bits into the confetti of money. Then he walked out, leaving the door yawning wide, abandoning their home and everything they had put into it, taking only the clothes he was wearing and his empty wallet and passport. He walked for almost two hours. When the soldier at the gate of the US embassy looked up at him, he said, “I'm AWOL from 'Nam.” The soldier picked up his phone, and Wallace said, “I give up. I give up, I give up, I give up, I
give up
.” He was weeping as they led him in.

He never saw her again. He was shipped home and served fourteen months at Fort Leavenworth, doing short time because of his valor in battle. During his imprisonment his mother died. When he came out, he owned the house in Carlsbad, which was worth a lot of money, as well as a substantial investment portfolio. It took him a few months to sell the house, liquidate the stocks, and send most of the money to Bangkok in small increments so as not to draw official attention, and then he grew impatient with how long the transfers were taking and he broke the law by getting on an airplane with almost a hundred thousand in cash, bills tucked absolutely everywhere.

She wasn't at Thai Heaven. Her friends in the bar avoided one another's eyes as they claimed they had no idea where she was. A few days after he arrived, he found the rooms over the shophouse, and over a period of weeks he decorated them in her favorite colors, buying the long body pillows she loved, the bright pastel sheets. At night he haunted Thai Heaven until they wouldn't let him in anymore, and then he made the rounds, dusk to dawn, night after night, of the other establishments on the Golden Mile, even Jack's American Bar, where the black soldiers who at first greeted him with stares gradually came to accept him, although the women, careful of their relationships with their black customers, wouldn't give him a glance.

He returned alone every night to the home he had made for her above the shophouse. Jah's place.

Patpong Road had just opened up, a strand of relatively flashy new bars siphoning customers from the Golden Mile, and he scouted that, too, every single bar every night for nights on end, but she wasn't working there either. One night on Patpong around 3
a.m.
, exhausted, half drunk, and unwilling to return to the home he had turned into a shrine to her, he walked into a tiny place called the Expat Bar. And he stayed there for forty-three years.

Getting old.

25

Shoveling Snow in a Blizzard

For the next
couple of days, Rafferty is propelled by a numb, amorphous, centralized anxiety that seems to have plastered itself to his heart and lungs, with occasional forays southward to his gut. At unpredictable moments it gives him a squeeze, as though demanding attention.

It's worst at night, as he discovers the very first night after Treasure has been tranquilized and he finally climbs back into the soft hotel bed. Once
Rose—who woke long enough to say hello—took her unvarying, unswerving dip into the deepest realms of sleep, he lay there stewing, staring at the ceiling and trying to see a clear way forward. They all either dead-end or lead him into useless loops. He feels like a man shoveling snow in a blizzard, clearing a path to the sidewalk at last only to turn and see that it's all filled in behind him.

He has lists, of course—he always has lists—and early the next morning he methodically goes over them, choosing the actions that might actually change things for the better. Some of those, unfortunately, depend on Arthit, and the affection between them is strained by what they left unsaid. Rafferty doesn't blame Arthit for anything that's happening, and he's certain that Arthit doesn't blame him, but the issue of Treasure—what Rafferty sees as Arthit's unsympathetic snap judgment about her and what Arthit undoubtedly sees as Rafferty's willful minimization of the facts that the girl tried to kill everyone in her house and then took a knife to Sriyat—seems to be uniquely undiscussable. The whole snarl comes down to feelings, and neither of them has any skill at talking about feelings. So, man style, they'll probably continue to avoid the entire issue.

Rafferty sits motionless at the hotel room's dining table for a moment and then adds to his list:
Fix things with Arthit
.

Treasure is back in the room at the shelter with the hospital bed in it, the room to which she was taken the night Chalee and Dok found her. Rafferty had checked on her the moment he gave up on sleep and got out of bed to text Anna, who spent the night in an adjoining room. This undoubtedly heightens Arthit's resentment, which had already deepened the previous evening when Anna insisted that he keep his two cops on protective duty.

So Treasure is protected, and she's getting visits from a doctor and is being kept mildly sedated, but she's back on that same damn bed. According to Anna, she doesn't move or speak, just lies on one side, her knees drawn up, one arm under her head. She'd lain there motionless, refusing to eat until about 11
a.m.
, when Chalee was finally persuaded to pay a visit. The two of them had shared the room in silence, Treasure still in that same withdrawn position, until she'd closed her eyes and begun silently to cry. After a long moment, Chalee pulled her chair closer and put a hand on Treasure's arm. Anna tactfully left the room.

Rafferty heaves a sigh that practically hollows him out. How much can happen to one kid? She hasn't spoken a word since she went down on the pavement the previous evening.

When he's not tormenting himself over Treasure's emotional state and his bad judgment in hiring Sriyat and Pradya, Rafferty is stewing about Varney, what to do about Varney. Unless Arthit's extensive check of hotels turns the man up, Rafferty's only plan is to continue making himself as visible as possible in the Patpong area in the hope that Varney will contact him to arrange a talk. He has to convince Varney that he doesn't have the money or Treasure. Or, if there's no alternative, remove him from the picture somehow.

It's not much, but it's all he's got.

His worry about Sriyat's being dead fades a bit around 9
a.m.,
when Sriyat's partner, Pradya, fails to show up for his shift. A call to his cell phone gets a “not in use” recording. Rafferty can only theorize that Pradya was in on the scheme to grab Treasure from the beginning and was sufficiently nearby to come and haul Sriyat out in answer to a phone call for help.

So that's a very pale piece of good news: Arthit can't claim that Treasure killed Sriyat, self-defense or no self-defense. At least until the body turns up.

At the top of one of his lists is an enumeration of his weak spots. He's decided that his weakest—now that they're out of the apartment—is Miaow's school. It shouldn't be that difficult for Varney to find out where Miaow goes to school; he has to figure that Rafferty lives somewhere near Patpong, and there are only three international schools within reasonable driving distance. Miaow goes to the closest of them.

So on Tuesday morning at breakfast, after a sleepless night, a couple of hours spent with his lists, and two chats, via text, with Anna about Treasure's status, he announces to Miaow that as of now he's taking her to school. He gets an unexpected argument: Miaow wants to continue to use the school's private bus. Rafferty points out that she'd have to take a cab from the hotel to get to the bus's pickup point. Miaow's reaction is simple and sharp: she
wants to take the bus
.

“Why?” he says, trying to blink the sand from his eyes. She's sitting opposite him at the table in the suite's small dining room. She's ordered waffles—which she's not eating—an orange, which she is, and a Diet Coke, and he's gnawing on cardboard toast and avoiding the coffee, which is the color of tea.

Miaow says, “Because.”

While he counts silently, waiting for additional information, he breaks off a corner of the toast and crumbles it onto his plate, then moistens his thumb, presses it into the pile of crumbs, and licks the crumbs off. When he's done and he's reached fifteen, he says, “Because why?”

“Because the kids are on the bus.” She looks longingly over her shoulder in the direction of the bedroom where Rose is sleeping.

“Forget it,” he says. “You couldn't wake her up with dynamite. I'm driving you to and from school, and that's the way it is.”

“But
 . . .
” Miaow says. She gives her attention to peeling the foil off a packet of strawberry jam that accompanied her waffles and then sticking her tongue directly into the packet. Normally this would earn her a mild verbal reprimand, but Rafferty just rests his chin in his hand and watches, as though it's the most interesting moment of the day.

Finally he says, “Aha.”

She glances at him and then away. “Aha what?”

“Just aha.”

Miaow drags her forefinger through the remainder of the jam and smears it in a circle on the end of her nose.

“Does
Edward
take the bus?” Rafferty asks with big-eyed innocence.

“I'm busy,” Miaow says. She draws two strawberry cat whiskers on her right cheek.

“I'm going to pick you up and take you home, too.”

“You can't,” she says, working on her left cheek. “I don't know what time we'll finish.” She licks the remaining jam off her finger.

“Why's that?”

“Today we do tech rehearsal,” she says triumphantly. “The whole play twice, with all the lights and sound. It'll take
days
.”

Rafferty says, “Do we have any more jam?”

“No.” She puts her finger in her mouth. “I used it all up.”

“I love tech rehearsals.”

“How would you know?” If Miaow's tone of voice were a visible entity and using the Delsarte method, it would be leaning forward with its hands on its hips, elbows pulled back. “You don't even know what a tech rehearsal—”

“The first time I ever saw you act,” Rafferty says, “was a tech rehearsal. Mrs. Shin called for the thunder and lightning and the sound of the wind, and then the follow spot went on, and there you were, way up on that rock, doing your first speech as Ariel.” He has one hundred percent of her attention. “You were wonderful.”

“How wonderful?”

“The hair on my arms stood straight up.”

“Really.” She leans her cheek on her right hand, but the jam is too slippery and she skids off it.

“You got it on your neck,” he says.

“Who cares?” she says. “Did the hair on your arms really stand up?”

He extends his arm and runs his hand up and down it, a quarter inch from the skin. “Goosebumps.”

“Okay,” she says, getting up. “You can take me to school. But you have to talk some more about how good I was.” She reaches into the pocket of her shirt and tosses an unopened packet of jam onto the table. “For you,” she says, and as he watches her go, he remembers the abandoned, damaged, mistrustful child he'd first seen on the street, and when he thinks about how far she's come, with no therapy but love, a sudden surge of pity for Treasure almost rips his heart from his chest.

About 1
p.m.
that day, Arthit calls to say that none of the hotels they've contacted has Varney's passport on record, and no one who's looked at their emails and faxes recognizes the face from the passport photo.

“Just out of curiosity, how many?” Rafferty says.

“There are more than a thousand Western-style hotels in Bangkok,” Arthit says, sounding as though he's personally called every one of them, “of varying degrees of luxury or squalor. There's also an uncountable number of guesthouses and less formal, more downscale arrangements. Flophouses, by-the-hour hotbeds, and terrorist dens, in other words. Most of those are run by people with no fondness for the police, so we've been concentrating on the mainstream establishments, and it's a zero.”

Rafferty says, “Well, shit,” startling the waitress at his elbow.

“I think we've hit all the ones he's likely to be staying in,” Arthit says. “It's hard to picture him on Khao San.”

Rafferty is in the hotel's bright orange, ground-level coffee shop, clearly misnamed if the mystery fluid in his half-empty cup is any evidence. “So he's not staying anywhere. That's just great. Absolutely consistent with everything else.”

“Well, this might brighten your day a bit. I got to thinking about what you said about Treasure maybe being Murphy's heir. Murphy wasn't a careless man, and I figured he probably made some arrangements for the disposition of his stuff. So I called a guy I know who worked the investigation into the explosion at the house and asked about a will, and he said there was a fireproof safe on the ground floor, and inside it was an
‘in the event of my death' letter that directed people to a lawyer in Colorado Springs, which I suppose is in Colorado.”

“That's where it is.”

“Good place for it. So I called him—Hiram E. Bixby, a name from the age of buggy whips—and asked him to get his hands on the will and call me back. I was the first to tell him that Murphy was dead, so I sent him a link to the story that broke in the
Sun
.”

“What reason did you give for asking about the will?”

“I said people are making greedy noises around the estate, and we think they might be fraudulent. Got his lawyer's blood pressure right up. But I've been waiting a few hours for him now.”

“It's after midnight in Colorado.”

“How thoughtless of them,” Arthit says, “to have their own time zone.” There's a pause. Then he says, “Bixby's wife is named Huldah. Not a name you hear often, so I looked it up. Huldah was a prophetess in the Old Testament, and the name seems to come from the word for ‘weasel.' Not sure I'd hand it to a kid.”

Anything about a child seems like an opening, and Rafferty jumps on it. “I want to apologize for ever having hired Sriyat. What happened last night was my fault. You warned me about him, and I didn't listen.”

“I didn't suggest anything better.”

“Well, he's apparently alive, Sriyat is, since his buddy, Pradya, can't be reached by phone.”

“I suppose that's good,” Arthit says grudgingly. “But it's hard to care about either of them. And as long as we're talking, I might as well say that I wouldn't be so stressed about Treasure if I weren't afraid she's going to cost me my relationship with Anna.”

“I know.”

“Anna sees herself as the girl's savior. She's convinced that she can keep Treasure from cutting her wrists someday.”

“Might be true. So how are you doing?”

“I've only had one night alone, and I hate it. I'm making my own breakfast.”

“And washing the dishes?” Rafferty says.

“We have a lot of dishes,” Arthit says. “I'll wash one when they're all dirty.”

“Would you like to come eat with us? We could call room service together. You could have a thirty-dollar hamburger.”

“No thanks. I'll just nibble a couple of bad shrimp and feel sorry for myself.”

“Okay, but the food here is—” He breaks it off. “You know what? It's awful. They put truffles on everything. I feel like I'm on the Gout Diet.”

“This will distract you. According to the cop I talked to, Varney was right about the gas. Every burner, both ovens in the kitchen, on full.”