The Hot Countries (9 page)

“Maybe,” she says, “maybe I should go.”

“You're safe here,” Anna says, and Boo says, “We won't let anyone—”

“You
don't know,
” she says, her voice scaling up.

Arthit says, “Don't know what?”

“Don't know who
 . . .
don't know who
 . . .
”

“You need to tell us,” Rafferty says. “We're going to keep him away from you.”

She makes a sound that it takes Rafferty a moment to recognize as a laugh. He says, “Who is he?”

“My, my, my
 . . .
” Her jaw is trembling so violently that Rafferty can hear her teeth chattering. He goes to her, turns the chair around, toward her, and kneels beside it. After a long moment of looking down at him, she sits. Anna starts to say something but cuts it off and swallows.

“Look at us all,” Rafferty says. “We're all here, we're going to take care of you.” He's ransacking his mind for the thing he should say. “We promise. I'll
 . . .
I'll get more people here.”

“He
 . . .
he won't care,” she says. “If he
 . . .
if he
 . . .
he
wants
me, he'll come. He'll take me. I belong to him now.” She's up from the chair, shaking her head, moving as aimlessly as a butterfly for a moment and then turning her back on them and heading for the door.

From across the room, Arthit says,
“Treasure.”
His tone stops her. She angles her head toward him, not turning her body, her eyes on the floor at a point midway between them. “I'm a policeman,” Arthit says. “We can protect you.”

Treasure has both fists clenched and pressed against her thighs, “He's not the same as you. He doesn't care. He doesn't hurt. He can't be hurt, he just
wants
. He wants, and he
 . . .
he
 . . .
he won't care, won't care if you're there or if you have a gun, he doesn't care about guns. If he—” She turns away again. “I should go.”

Boo calls, “Chalee.”

“No.” Treasure says, “
Not Chalee
,” as Chalee comes in, her wide eyes making it clear that she's heard everything. “Don't let him see Chalee. Or Dok. Not Dok, not Tip, not any of them, not
any
of them, not any, any, any—”

Still kneeling next to the chair, Rafferty says, “Treasure.”

The sharpness in his voice cuts her off and brings her eyes down to him.

“He is
not
going to hurt you. He doesn't know where you are. No one will tell him, ever. Everyone here promises you that. All of us, and we'll bring in more people to protect you. Other policemen, right, Arthit?”

“There will always be someone here,” Arthit says. “If he tries to get near you, we'll kill him.”

Chalee says, “Why would he want to hurt Treasure?”

Treasure says, “You
have
to kill him. You can't hurt him. He doesn't
 . . .
he doesn't hurt.”

“What does that mean?” Arthit says.

“My father said he didn't hurt, not ever. I didn't believe him, so Paul held a lighter under his hand until I could smell it cooking, but he just looked at me until my father told him to stop, and when he did, part of his hand was black and it had cracks in it, like dried mud, and he held it up in front of my face and then slapped the burned part with his other hand. Then he laughed at the way I looked.”

The room is silent. Chalee's eyes fill half her face, as though something has just come through the wall at her.

Treasure says, “He told my, my
father
,
he told my father he bit off p-p-part of his tongue when he was a kid because he didn't feel it. He had to learn to
 . . .
to talk all over again, and now he talks
all the time
. He can do
anything
.” She knots Rafferty's T-shirt in her fist. “My
 . . .
my father was
afraid
of him. You have to kill him.”

“We'll find him,” Arthit says.

Boo says, “Is that possible? Not to hurt?”

“I read something about it in a newspaper a long time ago,” Rafferty says. “A little girl, eleven or twelve, who couldn't feel pain. She couldn't imagine what it felt like to hurt. Her parents found out when the little girl was helping to make pasta and she dropped the spoon into the pot, and she reached into the boiling water and pulled it out while her mother screamed at her. She spent the rest of her childhood padded like a mummy.” Everyone is staring at him. “Most people who have this thing, like a mutation to a certain gene, die in childhood because they don't know they've been hurt.”

“This man, Paul,” Arthit says to Treasure, “Why was he at your house?”

“They did things together,” Treasure says. “The things my, my father did. Blow things up. Kill people, hurt people. Fright-fright-
frighten
people. When my father was angry at me, he, he used to say he would give me to
 . . .
to Paul.”

“Is that what you meant,” Poke says, “when you said you belonged to him?”

“Not—no, no.” She breaks off to swallow, and she is looking directly at Rafferty. “He said if he ever died
 . . .
my father said, if he ever died, I would be-belong to Paul. Paul would
 . . .
would come for me.”

Rafferty gets up, and for the first time since he met her, he puts an arm around the girl's shoulders. She starts but then holds still, allowing it. He says, “That's not going to happen.”

“You're going to stay with us,” Arthit says. He and Boo have been out in the alley for the past five minutes, arguing loudly enough to be heard, and he's just returned to the room.

The look that Treasure gives him is just short of terrified. Seeing it, Anna begins to get up, but Treasure says, almost in a whisper, “Chalee.”

“Fine.” Arthit looks at Anna, who makes a tiny shrug, although Rafferty sees Chalee register it. “Chalee, too. Will you
 . . .
I mean, would you like to come, Chalee?” Chalee looks away, and Treasure doesn't respond, so Arthit says, “Does that sound better?”

Treasure nods. She seems to be examining the room as though looking for an escape route. Standing beside her, Chalee flicks her upper arm with an index finger, and Treasure says, quickly, “Yes.”

“And you'll both come back with Anna for school every day.”

“I'll have a few people here, keeping their eyes open,” Rafferty says, trying to think of who they might be.

Treasure lets her gaze settle on him, and then her eyes drift away, and he has the feeling that she's assessed him and found him wanting.

“And I'll come over,” he says. “I'll tell you what, I'll come over to Arthit's every evening around eight o'clock. If that's okay, I mean.”

She nods, and Chalee gives him the smile he was hoping for from Treasure.

Sitting behind Boo's cracked laptop, Anna says, “Could he smell?” She looks up at Treasure.

“Smell?” Treasure says. “Oh. Oh,
smell
? He couldn't. He said so. And my, my father asked what would happen if he
 . . .
if he were in a house where the gas was—” She takes a sudden breath and breaks off, and her eyes make a quick circuit of the room, and then she's looking at the floor again.

“The gas?” Rafferty asks.

“If the gas was leaking.” She says the words very quickly. Her eyes go to everyone in the room for an instant, but at chest level. “And he
 . . .
he
 . . .
he said he'd probably get blown up.” Her hands are fists.

“‘Congenital insensitivity to pain,'” Anna reads aloud, stumbling a little over the words. “You were right, Poke. It's a problem with a gene, or maybe three genes. Most of the people who can't feel pain can't smell things either.”

Treasure says, “I'm frightened.”

“I know,” Poke says. “But we're not just going to keep you away from him. We're going after him, and when we find him, you'll never have to think about him again.” He looks at his watch. “In fact,” he says, getting up, “I might learn something about him right now.”

9

Lutanh and Betty

It's a surprise
to open the door of the Expat Bar and smell perfume instead of beer and old-fashioned hair oil. The source of the fragrance is easy to identify, since the bar is empty except for Toots and the two ladyboys, one seated on either side of Leon.

At first glance Rafferty decides that the pair of them represent opposite ends of the commercial ladyboy spectrum. The one on Hofstedler's left is almost childishly small, slight, delicate, conventionally pretty in such a feminine way that Rafferty doubts his own eyes. The only real tip-off is a shadowy Adam's apple, which suggests she's new to the game. The surgical reduction of this telltale is a specialty at the hospital to which Leon was dragged after his heart attack, but it's usually one of the later touch-ups.

The ladyboy on the right is almost as tall as Rafferty and probably a few pounds heavier, with a linebacker's shoulders, a private eye's square jaw, and, even through makeup as thick as stucco, a charcoal smudge of beard shading her chin. Her nose is as blunt as a thumb, and her lips have obviously never been plumped. She's
in her unapologetic fifties, and Rafferty instinctively likes the look in
her eye. It says,
Fuck you if you can't take a joke, and maybe even if you can
.

Rafferty is not a connoisseur of ladyboys, but his guess is that the little one is for men who want to persuade themselves they thought they were going with a woman until,
Good Lord
, it was too late, and the big one is for men who are just shopping for a guy dressed like a girl. In between these extremes are the ones fishing for clients who just want ladyboys.

“Ah, here is Poke,” says Leon, who has never shied from stating the obvious. “We have just been seated, yes, Toots?”

“Still pouring,” Toots says, and indeed she is, upending over a glass a bottle of some kind of orange soda that Rafferty's never seen in here before.

“Lutanh,” Leon says, indicating the smaller one without actually touching her, “does not drink. But Betty—”

“Betty drink all the time,” says Betty, hoisting a double of mislabeled Mekong. “Betty like drink too much.” Betty's voice is of a piece with her general appearance. If there were a ladyboy production of
Showboat
, she'd be the one to tackle “Old Man River.”

Rafferty says hello to both of them and gets a truck driver's laugh and an elbow in the ribs from Betty when he repeats his first name. He takes the stool next to Lutanh for safety's sake and says, “Thanks for setting this up, Leon.” He's speaking English in front of the girls because Leon has resolutely declined to learn Thai.

“This is not a problem,” Hofstedler says. “This man, I don't like him myself.”

“Man?” says Lutanh in a voice wispy enough to have issued from a column of steam. “I think you say
girl
.”

“It is a girl,” Rafferty says, “but I think she can lead me to the man Leon was just talking about.”

“Bad man?” Betty licks away a droplet of whiskey sliding down the outside of her glass, the steel ball stuck through the tip of her tongue making an alarming
clack
.

“Actually, yes,” he says. “In fact, both of you need to know that he's a very bad guy indeed, and I strongly suggest you stay the hell away from him. And, Leon, if I'm not in here tonight, please tell Bob and the other guys to do the same.”

“You think he will come back?” Hofstedler looks unsettled by the idea.

“Last night I would have said no,” Rafferty says. “He's done what he needed to do. But that was before I knew he was crazy. And I'm not just throwing the word around. He's as crazy as a shark on methamphetamine.”

“
Yaa baa,
” Lutanh suggests, using one of the Thai names for crank.

“Good-looking?” Betty asks as Lutanh takes a hummingbird sip of her orange soda. Lutanh's nails, curved around the glass like a circular stairway, are at least two inches long and have been painted an orange that complements the drink.

“I don't know,” Rafferty says. “Not much.”

“Not,” says Leon.

“Some crazy man, very sexy,” Betty says, dismissing both of them.

“Don't get near him. I mean it, he's dangerous.”

“Look like what?” Betty says.

Rafferty describes Varney—
Paul
, he silently corrects himself—and when he gets to the snake tattoo, Lutanh says, just above a whisper, “I see him before.”

“Where?”

“He come my bar.”

“Which one?”

“This or That Bar,” she says. “Patpong 2.”

Leon says, “Not the Queen's Corner?”

“I change,” Lutanh says. “Have better customer at This or That Bar.”

“Did he take anyone?”

“No. Come three time last week, then not come. Buy me drink. Have watch, big like steering wheel. Have, have
ngu
.”

Betty says, “Lao for ‘snake.'”

“Me,” Lutanh says, pointing at herself. “Me Lao.”

Hofstedler says, with a faint blush, “Lot of ladyboys from Laos now.”

“We pretty,” Lutanh says.

“Have
you
seen him?” Rafferty asks Betty.

“No,” Betty says. “But I look, just for you, okay?” She shows him two rows of big, even teeth.

“Okay. But don't do anything that might tell him you're
 . . .
you know, interested, not in any way. If he even glances at you, you go in another direction.”

“And lady?” Betty says. “Lady you want to know about?”

Rafferty describes her, and when he gets to the birthmark, Lutanh says, “I see
her
, too. I see in street, about six o'clock, two, three times.” She pronounces it “sick o'clock,” which had bewildered Rafferty when he first arrived in Bangkok.

“Which end?” Rafferty says. “Was she coming from Silom or Surawong?”

“Surawong, same as me.”

“Six o'clock.”

“Maybe sick thirty. Sick, sick thirty.”

“Could you tell where she was going?”

“Other side,” Lutanh says, lifting her chin toward Patpong. “Other side of night market.”

“Got it,” Rafferty says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a thousand-baht bill. “Can you two split this?”

“Oh, no,” Lutanh says. Suddenly she looks shy. “I do for you. No money.”

“I'd rather—” he begins, but Betty, moving so fast he doesn't see her hand, snatches the bill.

“Lutanh, she like you,” Betty says. She gives him the big teeth again, but this time it looks like she's thinking about taking a bite. “She think maybe you like ladyboy, but me, I know. You like lady. Yes?”

“Yes,” Rafferty says. He looks at Lutanh, feeling obscurely guilty. “I'm sorry.”

Barely audible, Lutanh says, “No problem.” She doesn't look up.

“I give her five hundred later,” Betty says. “Eight o'clock tonight, nine o'clock, she forget you.”

Lutanh laughs, covering her mouth with her hand, Japanese style.

“Come to my bar,” Betty says. “We have real lady, too.”

Rafferty starts to reply, but Hofstedler speaks first. “These
 . . .
girls,” Hofstedler says, and he surprises Rafferty by leaning back on his stool and putting his arms around their shoulders. Even Toots, who has seen literally everything, looks surprised. “These girls saved my life.” His blush deepens to a fierce red. “These wonderful girls saved my life.”

It's nearly sick o'clock, and Rafferty heads up Patpong to Surawong, almost the lone male swimming against the tide of young women streaming into Patpong to report for work. They come in twos and threes, most of them, some with their hair gleaming from a recent shower, either holding hands or interlocking elbows with this week's best friend. Rose has told him how deep and how short some of these relationships are. In an environment where it's essential for someone to have your back, the climate is rich for sudden, intimate friendships and unforgivable betrayals.

The majority of them wear the universal Southeast Asian street uniform of T-shirt and jeans, and most of them are not made up yet, saving that task to be done among their friends and not-friends on the benches that will be crowded with men only ninety minutes later. It's an evening ritual, chatting and painting their faces beneath the flat fluorescents that will snap off at 7
p.m.
in favor of glittering disco balls and the primary-color spotlights that will airbrush the women's flesh into a smooth, blemish-free, marketable commodity. For now what he sees are the unadorned faces of the northeast, the rice basket of Southeast Asia, where for decades farmers and their families have methodically been cheated by private industry and the government alike, scraping along at subsistence level and, when even that is beyond them, sending their sons and daughters south to the bars, brothels, massage parlors, sidewalks, and escort services of Bangkok.

The sex trade, like the rice trade, drives up the nation's gross national product for the benefit of the sleek and the fat, so these impoverished farm families are making a double contribution—their rice
and
their children—to support the rich men in their billion-baht houses and to pay the cops and soldiers who are called into action when the squeezed rise up in protest. It is, he thinks, a system in which the prey funds the dental work that preserves the teeth of the predators
.

The woman with the birthmark had come in from Surawong, according to the wispy-voiced Lutanh. The problem, from a surveillance perspective, is that the high roofs of the night-market booths running down the center of Patpong block the view of whichever side of the street the watcher isn't on. Rafferty can't just stand around in plain sight, because she'll probably see him before he sees her. The last thing he wants to do is tip Varney that he's on the hunt; if he has any advantage at all, it's that Varney doesn't know that the quarry has turned around to sniff the air.

The thought of Varney, an outlier if there ever was one, brings to mind Rafferty's concept of circles of reality, which he originally formulated as a boy in the desert outside Lancaster, California. Of all his early ideas about how the world works, that was the one most altered by travel. Everyone, he has long believed, lives more or less comfortably in the center of a circle of reality, circumscribed by culture and geography and expectation. It may be challenged and reshaped occasionally by an unforeseen tragedy or a windfall blowing into it like a meteorite, yet by and large it changes slowly, with time and experience. But travel made it inescapably clear to Rafferty that the circle of reality for a middle-class American desert boy has little in common with that of an Indonesian rice farmer, which has little in common with that of Rafferty's Manhattan book editor, which in turn has little in common with the circle of reality of a terrified child bride in Pakistan or an African woman stranded in the midst of a tribal war.

And yet, as widely different from each other as those circles are, Rafferty is certain that Varney orbits a space far beyond the sharp edge of improbability that borders every one of them. However varied the circles are, there's one way in which they're all identical: they all exclude Arthur Varney.

On the far side of Surawong, he sees what he needs—a foot-massage shop with a big plate-glass window. He crosses the road carefully, and for two hundred baht he buys twenty minutes in the chair nearest the window. He tips the masseuse to leave his feet alone.

For a few minutes, he loses himself in the street scene. Then his attention is drawn to a couple on the other side of the glass, a middle-aged
farang
and a younger Thai woman, arguing. Their faces are intense and hard, but Rafferty thinks he could sense the argument even if they were headless. The man's arms are crossed defensively across his chest, and the woman has one hand on her hip with the elbow angled sharply back, away from the man.
Hands on hips
, he thinks. It can mean several things. One hand on the hip, with the elbow pulled back like that, is anger pure and simple. It's as easy to read as a face.

He hears Miaow's voice in his ear, saying
Delsarte
, and he realizes that he's eavesdropping visually and that the Delsarte method is a terrifically valuable asset to someone who wants to do exactly that. And he's suddenly conscious of the position of his own body, leaning toward the window with one hand clasping the arm of the chair, a posture that announces,
I'm watching
. He turns back into the room and finds three of the masseuses watching him watch the street.
Attention draws attention
, he thinks.

So he smiles and sits back and exhales, doing the Delsarte version of a guy relaxing in a comfortable chair, and when he turns idly to the window again he sees the woman he's been waiting for climb out of a cab on the other side of the street: the long spiral curls, the smudge above her mouth. She's wearing full makeup an hour before she's due on the stage, and he thinks,
She probably always wears it
.