The Hot Countries (31 page)

And he's changed his appearance: he's now a slimmer, shorter man with light brown hair and rimless glasses. He's been wearing shoes with lifts in them since his first appearance in the Expat Bar, so he's now almost three inches shorter than he was. He's also discarded the outsize clothing and the light cotton padding he'd worn under it. Silhouette is about half of a person's visual signature from more than eight or ten meters away, and his silhouette is much less imposing than when Rafferty last saw him. Facially he's not worried, since, in the unlikely event that someone he hasn't met
is looking for him—if Rafferty has somehow interested the police—that someone will probably be trying to match the face in Varney's passport or some cocked-up Photoshop of a broad-shouldered bald guy.

That leaves patterns to worry about. Anyone who's watching will be waiting for someone, anyone, who keeps popping up or appears to be loitering. So he's packed into his computer bag two clean shirts of different colors and a jacket so he can change his color pattern two or three times over the course of the day, and he's also stashed a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment of the car. None of this will be enough, probably, if they've got half a dozen people looking out for him, but he doesn't think they will; Rafferty couldn't muster that much support, and even if he could, they'd be afraid of chasing him away.

He has Kiet ready to go, gun and long coat and all, within five minutes of here. He has a driver with a small car who will drive slow loops very close to, but not in front of, the school, until he gets the call, and then he'll do what they've gone over a dozen times. Both Kiet and the driver have been booked from early morning to late at night. The driver is the weak link, because he might just floor it and take off if things get hot, so Varney has introduced him to Kiet and made it very clear what will happen if he, Varney, gets stranded. However it shakes out, the whole key is speed: go in fast, inflict blunt force fast, make the grab fast, and get away from the scene while people are still trying to figure out what just happened.

When he looked at the possibilities and at the school layout late Thursday afternoon, he identified five, or possibly six, potential opportunities to grab Miaow, four in daylight and one, possibly two, at night.

So far the day has been a grave disappointment.

He'd been sitting in the car at 7:30
a.m.
, waiting for the first opportunity—the likelihood, however remote, that Miaow would be brought to school between eight and nine. The opening of the school day was guaranteed to be a mob scene, with the entire student body arriving at once, but he knows how to turn a mob scene into an advantage. He'd sat there, peering through holes in the sunshade with the getaway car idling half a block away, until ten, but he never sighted Miaow. This gave him a moment of uneasiness: was it possible the newspaper story
wasn't
a plant? Was it possible that it had surprised and horrified Rafferty and that he'd pulled her out of the play? Or had someone brought her in through the parking area in back?

That, he decided, as a sudden flare of pure white fury subsided, was what they'd done. It would have made no sense for him to keep an eye on that back area. The gate was so slow to open and close that once he was inside it, getting out would have been like needing to skate to safety in November and having to wait for the lake to freeze.

So he had calmed his nerves, changed shirts, put on a cap, and positioned himself in his second blind, at the table in the window of the nearer restaurant in time for what he saw as the second and third possible opportunities of the day, before and after lunch. The neighborhood was full of restaurants. Maybe she'd go out to eat.

He was pretty certain she wouldn't; odds were twenty to one that she'd been ordered not to leave the campus. But
 . . .
kids were kids. Or maybe they
hadn't
ordered her, but in any case it would be stupid to ignore the opportunity, no matter how remote—especially since, as he'd visualized it, it would have been a snap. Miaow would be leaving school to eat in one of the nearby cafés, maybe with a few friends in attendance, and the car with him and Kiet in it would have materialized out of nowhere as she left the restaurant to go back to school: a screech of brakes, Kiet applying a little maximum force on the other kid while he snatched Miaow—all of them back in the car and out of the neighborhood in less than two minutes. They'd have been at the number hotel twenty minutes later.

But she didn't show. Although dozens and dozens of kids had poured out of the school and filtered through the neighborhood and then dutifully returned at one, Miaow hadn't been among them. So scratch daylight opportunities two and three, going to and coming from lunch.

The hope he'd been clinging to, without much faith that it would be rewarded, was that the entire evening exercise, which he instinctively saw as the most dangerous of all the scenarios, might prove to be unnecessary. But now, with most of the daylight possibilities gone, he begins to wonder again whether she really is coming at all.

Well, there's still one more daylight possibility: at 3
p.m.
classes will end. If she's actually inside the school, and if she's not staying there until the play begins, she'll come out with the rest of the kids, and probably Rafferty will be waiting to pick her up. It's equally probable, Varney thinks, that Rafferty will have backup in tow.

He makes a sudden decision. If she comes out at three and Rafferty picks her up, he'll have the driver follow Rafferty to wherever they're staying. That will mean engineering a second snatch, but this one isn't feeling good. So at two forty-five, his driver is waiting in front of the school, along with dozens of parents in taxis, as Varney watches from the restaurant, phone to his ear to identify her the moment she comes out, and Kiet is behind the school, across the street from the teachers' parking lot, to alert him with a call-waiting signal if any teacher gets into his or her car accompanied by a student.

By three thirty it's clear that Miaow has not left the school by either route.

Blocks away now, back on the sidewalk to stretch his legs, and trying to shrug off both his anger and another swirl of anxiety, he begins to wonder again whether they really
did
pull her out of the play.

If they did, he'll have to engineer a second snatch or keep his threat to tighten the spiral, and people will probably be watching the obvious candidates, those clowns in the bar. Barring an enormous stroke of luck, he's not going to be able to find out where Rafferty's got the wife and Miaow stashed. And he, Varney, is running out of time. Hotels are out of bounds, and he's not likely to score another empty condo.

That means it might be tonight or not at all. The simple trade: Miaow for Treasure. If Rafferty has Treasure, he'll make the swap in an instant. The key to all of Haskell Murphy's fortune, almost $30 million, counting the money from the house, will be delivered to him either tonight or tomorrow, or not at all. If Rafferty doesn't have Treasure, then Miaow for the money from the closet. Tonight or tomorrow, or not at all.

If it turns out to be
not at all
, though, he vows, he
will
kill Rafferty before he leaves Bangkok.

33

Opening Night

“Anand is there,”
Arthit says, putting his phone in his pocket. “In uniform and directing traffic, although so far there's not much traffic to direct.”

“Good,” Rafferty says. “I mean, good that he's there.” He's perspiring even in the air-conditioned hotel lobby, and he has stomach cramps that have hauled him into the bathroom several times already.

“As soon as people are inside the auditorium and the doors are closed,” Arthit says, “Anand will get into his car and drive off, in plain sight. He'll go to the hotel, just a few minutes away, and change into civilian clothes. As soon as it's completely dark, he'll take up his position.”

“The guy I'm most worried about is almost as tall as Anand and usually wears a long gray jacket. Name is Kiet.”

“Anand knows that,” Arthit says. “He's good, Poke. You've worked with him before. If that man is there, Anand will have him.”

Poke says, “And the plainclothesman in the lobby of the auditorium?”

“He's got the picture from Varney's passport and the one we monkeyed up to your description, and he'll be facing the door as the audience comes in. But chances are, as I said, Varney's not going into the auditorium. He'd have to tote her almost forty meters to get her to the street. He needs to hit fast and get out fast.”

“Okay.” Rafferty looks out through the hotel's glass doors at the
two waiting black town cars. Their windows are deeply tinted, and the doors are closed to keep the air-con in. It's been drizzling, so the
wipers have left clear half circles where they swiped the rain away and diamonds of water, reflecting the hotel lights, everywhere else. The drizzle is the only thing Rafferty is happy about at the moment: anything that reduces Varney's visibility for an additional moment or two, that might make him delay for a few seconds out of uncertainty, is a small item in their favor.

Arthit says, “You can still call it off.”

“And get him when?”

“There's that, of course,” Arthit says.

“So what do you think?”

“If I could think of anything else, I'd do it. We're doing everything we can to protect the audience and any other bystanders, but that doesn't mean nothing can go wrong.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “Of course not.” He looks across the lobby. “And then there's them.”

Standing bunched together around a huge ceramic jar shaped like a giant's funeral urn are Hofstedler, Pinky Holland, and Campeau. They look vulnerable outside their natural habitat. Beside Hofstedler, his head wrapped in bandages, is Wallace, wearing a light blue sport coat and a sling around his neck to support the cast on his right arm. He's slipped his good arm into the sleeve of the coat and draped the other side over his shoulder so the right sleeve hangs empty. The arm in the cast is invisible. He's leaning on a crutch propped under his left arm. The Growing Younger Man is a no-show.

Arthit says, “Send them home.”

“They won't go. They've got their damn tickets, they're going to see the play no matter what I say, and they're actually
hoping
Varney makes a move. They're all heroes. If I tell them to go away, they'll just come on their own, and then we won't have any control at all.”

Arthit says, “Well, then. It's time.”

“Could you shoehorn them all into the car in front?” Rafferty says. He takes a deep, deep breath. “I'll go to the bathroom one more time. Then I'll go upstairs and get her.”

The policeman directing traffic is a surprise.

He's tall and young and efficient. He stands in the middle of the road, separating cars right and left, waving along those who aren't going to the play and sending to the curb those who are. There's a backup of taxicabs carrying audience members, and the cop works his way down the line, ordering the drivers to inch forward until they're closer to the entrance to let their passengers out. He seems to be completely engrossed in his job, keeping traffic moving and organizing the drop-offs.

It's a rich school, Varney thinks, sitting in the damaged car. It can afford a cop for special occasions. So it looks plausible.

But he doesn't buy it, and a little spark kindles just behind his eyes. If there's a cop here, Miaow is here, too. He's still got a chance at her.

He'd considered skipping the arrival of the audience, if only to reduce his exposure to anyone who might be on the lookout. If Miaow is actually going to appear in the play, she's been inside the school all day. But what if Rafferty doesn't show? If he comes, will his wife be with him? She'll present another target. Will there be a group? Every possibility has its advantages. Group confusion can be the most valuable asset: get a bunch of people running into one another, rolling around like balls on a table, and you can waltz away untouched.

He's reasonably certain he can pull it off and get clear. He's done harder things. What infuriates him is that it's
Rafferty
who's brought him to this point. It had seemed so easy at the outset; Rafferty was a
writer
, for Christ's sake. Spook him a little bit and hold out your arms for him to unload everything you want. Nothing about the man set off alarms. He seemed like a typical, woman-dominated American wisp of smoke, driven out of his own house by his wife and daughter, hanging with a bunch of mummies because he's comfortable with people who are weaker, physically, than he is. In other words, a pushover.

And yet here I am
, Varney thinks,
with all my experience, and I don't even know whether he's got the fucking girl.

He's squinting through the drizzle on the windshield as the cop turns his back and leans down to argue with a taxi driver, and he risks reaching out to wipe away the water. Much better. The parents are about what he'd expect: largely white and North Asian, a sprinkling of Africans, not many Thais. They're in their forties mostly, obviously well-off, the women hiding their nice clothes under umbrellas. He's got his own umbrella lying on the backseat. An umbrella, used right, is a portable blind.

The light is beginning to fail. It'll drop almost imperceptibly for the next thirty minutes or so, and then, with tropical swiftness, it will go dark. For right now, though, it's bright enough to see. He's getting bored when the two black cars pull up, the cop ushering them to the head of the line with the deference shown to money all over this city.

He sits up straight. The fat kraut from the bar, Leon something, has climbed out of the front seat of the first car, and here come the rest of the Incontinence Patrol: that little bald one with the shiny head, the prune-faced skinny guy—
Bob
, the famous
Bob
—who always sits at the end. And now the kraut is leaning forward, helping someone out of the backseat, someone wearing
 . . .
what? A turban? No, it's bandages, and Jesus fucking Christ, it's the guy from the alley. Taller, when seen standing among the others, than he'd seemed before, and moving pretty stiffly on one crutch, which should come as no surprise.
Well, at least now
, Varney thinks,
I know why it didn't make the news
.

The driver of the second car hops out and runs around to open the rear door, which makes it clear which car contains the person who's paying for everything. First out is a Thai man of medium height in a dark suit, no tie. He's got dark skin and a round belly, but despite the belly there's nothing cozy-looking about him. Just the way he scans the area is enough to say cop. The back of Varney's neck prickles. He resists the impulse to check his rearview mirror. The cop leans down and says something, and Rafferty gets out. Like the cop, Rafferty takes a deliberate look around, and then he steps away from the car door and extends a helping hand as a third person emerges into the fading light, maybe the wife, but no, it's not the wife, it's—

Varney's heart stops.

His first reaction is,
That son of a bitch
. His second reaction is,
Everything just got easier
. His third reaction is sheer, unmitigated joy as he takes in the slight frame, the pale face, the stiff, anxious position of the shoulders, the tangle of reddish brown hair. He'd have recognized her even without seeing the hair and the nocturnal pallor of her skin, just by the way she walks, as though there might be unexploded mines beneath her feet, and the way she twists her head back and forth in the habit of a lifetime, looking,
looking
for her awful father.

With one of his hands supporting her elbow and with the old guys trailing behind, Rafferty leads Treasure into the crowd, and they disappear from sight.

After the fact, Rafferty's recollections of Miaow's opening night are swirled together and formless, like colors applied over one another while wet and then smeared with a sleeve. The plainclothes cop watching each face as its owner comes in, Rose's hand landing on his arm, the news that Andrew has sent flowers all the way from Vietnam, that Rose has met Edward's father and one of his bar girls, and the father is
awful
. Poke has the feeling that everything is too bright, the way it is sometimes in dreams, and that he's squinting painfully against the glare, never completely sure that what he's seeing is what he seems to be seeing. Even the noise level seems to rise and fall at random.

Rose, leading the old guys and the girl down the aisle, and he and Arthit taking seats on the aisle in the last row. The first laugh of the evening—thirty seconds in—when Luther, limping as if one of his legs is made out of sponge, reads his lines off his palm. The leap of Poke's heart when Miaow blossoms out of the darkness of the wings and moves center stage, and the realization that the man who immediately stands and comes up the aisle can only be doing one thing, the bitterness of his satisfaction when, standing with the door to the lobby open an inch, he hears the man say into a cell phone, in English, “She's in it. The girl in the picture is—” and then sees the man snap the phone closed and leave through the front doors. Arthit's brisk nod when he hears the news, and the endless internal recycling of the plan, running through checks and cross-checks, possible surprises and responses. Looking up again—feeling like he's missed only a few minutes but realizing that it must have been longer—to see Julie and Ned taking their seats in that imaginary soda shop to talk about the future, and losing himself completely in what Miaow is doing up there.

The two of them get a hand as they leave the stage. For the rest of the performance, he's in that small town.

In the middle of Miaow's long and beautiful closing speech, the farewell of a girl brought back from the dead for one last wistful look at the beauty of the life she hadn't appreciated, Arthit's phone vibrates and Rafferty looks down at a text from Anand:
we've got kiet, but varney not in places kiet said: old car, cafe.

Arthit keys in
hold him out of sight around corner
and waits until the end of the standing ovation at the curtain call, all the parents up and cheering and the kids on the stage red-faced and grinning, before he shows Rafferty the rest of the exchange.

Rafferty says, “Tell them not to search for him. I want Varney to be confident.”

Arthit says, “I'd say he has good reason to be confident.”

* * *

In the backseat of the car, as it's driven slowly past the school, Varney sees the audience filing between the two buildings at the front of the campus. Some of the parents have private chauffeured cars or taxis waiting, but others are hiking down the diagonal street in search of a cab. The sprinkle has become a light rain now, still soft enough that the driver can flick the wipers on and off, but it's dark and everyone's umbrella is up, so Varney can't see any faces.

Better and better. He has the driver pull over, just past the biggest cluster of proud parents and family members, and he gets out, holding the umbrella at a tilt that obscures his face. As the car angles back into traffic, he does the “Excuse me” routine of someone who's looking for the person he's come to meet, threading his way politely through the crowd. Most of the people seem to be talking about the play, and he hears someone say, “The little Rafferty girl,” and the name snags at him, almost makes him miss his step, but he shrugs it off and keeps moving toward the administration building, just to the right of the entrance to the campus. Several people climb into cars, and doors slam, and the crowd moves forward, away from the front of the building and the dark, less-than-shoulder-high bushes that crowd up against it, and he moves forward with them, not wanting to stand out.

The crowd slows and stops again, and Varney stops with them. The woman next to him, blonde and elegantly forty-something in an Hermès scarf from twenty years ago, gives him a quick look and then a smile. “It was good, wasn't it?” she says, briskly British.

“It was,” he says. “I thought the little Rafferty girl was great.”

“They all were.” Her smile broadens a bit. “Is one of your children in the cast?”