The Queen of Patpong (3 page)

From behind the man, another man, almost as big, says, “This the one that got away?”

Rose hasn’t said anything. Rafferty looks over at her and sees astonishment and, behind it, like an electric current, a buzz of fear.

“I suppose this belongs to you,” the man says, his eyes flicking to Rafferty and then away again. “The little hubby, maybe? The kid can’t be yours, though, can she? I mean, you’d have had stretch marks, and I remember real good you didn’t have stretch marks.”

Rafferty starts to get up, but the man pushes the table back against him, trapping him partway up, without even glancing at him.

The man says to Rose, “I think you met John.” He turns his head a quarter of an inch toward the other man. “Oh, that’s right, you didn’t. But you talked to him on the phone, remember? Out on the rocks.” Finally looking at Rafferty, he says, “Stay down, Hubby,”

Rafferty shoves the table back and pushes himself the rest of the way up. He says, “I always stand when a lady comes to the table.”

The man grins and extends a hand as though to shake. “Howard Horner,” he says, and there’s a blur of movement and a glint of silver, and Rose stabs Horner in the hand. She holds her steak knife close to her chest, ready to use it again.

For Rafferty, time shudders to a stop. He sees Rose, motionless, the knife pointed outward, sees the blood flowing very slowly down Horner’s hand, sees Miaow, her mouth half open and both hands on the edge of the table as though she’s about to bolt and run.

“Rosie,” Horner says, without even pulling his hand back. It’s dripping blood onto the tablecloth, but he doesn’t give it so much as a glance. The other man has taken a couple of steps forward and then stopped. “This is how you say hi?” Horner asks.

A noise draws his eyes. Miaow is holding her steak knife, too, the serrated cutting edge facing Horner.

“The kid knows more about knives than you do,” Horner says. “Slash, don’t stab.” His uninjured hand streaks out, so fast Rafferty barely sees it move, and Rose gasps and snatches her own hand back, but when the blur is over, Horner is holding Rose’s knife. He leans forward, and Miaow’s knife comes up. “Remember that,” he says to Rose. “From an expert, remember?” He puts the knife back on the table, handle politely extended toward Rose. She makes no move to pick it up.

“I think the ladies would like you to leave,” Rafferty says.

“Ladies,”
Horner says over his shoulder to the one called John. Then he brings his pale gaze back to Rafferty and holds Rafferty’s eyes for a full minute without blinking, his expression absolutely flat.

Rafferty says, “I’ll bet you giggle before I do.”

Horner holds up the bleeding hand, his fingers spread out, the blood running down his wrist. “Pick a finger,” he says to Rafferty. “I’ll kill you with it.”

Suddenly strangled with rage, Rafferty shoves the table back and starts to force his way around it as Horner, looking pleased and sleepy, takes a step back to let Rafferty come at him, but Rose, in a single sweeping gesture, pulls the tablecloth off, and plates, glasses, and silverware crash to the floor.

The restaurant goes silent. Everyone in the place is looking at them. Horner glances around the room, sees the attentive audience, and nods appreciatively at Rose. He bends down, picks up a folded napkin from the floor, and wraps it around the bleeding hand. “We in your neighborhood?” he asks, backing away. “Great, great. See you again sometime. Got a lot to catch up on. We never finished our last conversation.”

The restaurant manager and some of the waiters and busboys are on their way over. Horner says, “Bye, Hubby.” He looks at Miaow and makes a pistol with his unwrapped hand, points it at her, and drops the thumb that represents the hammer. “Keep your eyes open, cutie.” The two men turn and walk toward the front door, Horner in the lead. Watching them go, watching their carriage and the roll of their shoulders, Rafferty thinks,
Military.

Miaow is staring after them, wide-eyed, and Rose is apologizing to the manager, but all Rafferty can manage to say is, “Who the fuck was
that
?”

Rose says, “Someone I thought I’d killed.”

Chapter 3
The Black Lake

T
hey sit for twenty minutes at the barren, grease-stained table, enduring the stares of the other diners. Rafferty and Miaow have been forced into silence by the intensity of Rose’s anger. She’s rigid with it. She sits with her back absolutely straight, both hands flat on the table with the fingers spread, the right hand resting on the handle of the knife, her breathing fast and shallow. She doesn’t look at either of them. Her eyes are focused on something invisible that’s one foot in front of her.

When some internal clock tells her it’s time, she waves the waiter over and sends him out to secure them a taxi and then insists that three of the restaurant’s male employees follow them onto the sidewalk and surround them as they get into the cab. Once in, she orders the driver to lock the doors, including his own, before she allows him to pull away from the curb. The car feels pressurized to Rafferty, as though the emotion trapped inside it might blow out the windows. When they’ve gone four or five blocks, Rose orders the driver to pull over fast without signaling, hands him fifty baht, and hurries them all out of the cab. To Rafferty’s amazement, she grabs Miaow’s hand and drags her into traffic. Rafferty trails helplessly behind his wife and child as they thread their way between speeding cars and trucks and motorbikes and
tuk-tuks
to the center island, where they clamber over the knee-high barrier that divides the opposing streams of traffic on Silom. Then they dodge suicidally between vehicles, setting off horns all the way, to the far curb, where Rose flags a second cab. All the while she is looking back to see whether anyone is making a U-turn at the divider break. When she’s satisfied that no one did, she tells the new driver to make the first turn that’s a through street.

“You look behind us,” she says to Rafferty.

“Who
was
he?” Miaow asks, her voice well into its upper register. She sounds eight again. “You thought you
killed
him?”

“I hoped I had,” Rose says. “Anyone back there, Poke?”

“As far as I can tell, no,” Rafferty says. “But, you know, headlights are headlights.”

“They would have had to cross Silom if they were on foot.” Rose says in Thai. Her voice is almost mechanically flat, the words precise and uninflected. “Or make a U-turn if they were in a car. I didn’t see anybody cross the street, and I know nobody made a U-turn.”

“Well, then,” Rafferty says.

The driver says, “Somebody following you?”

Rose, in the front seat, says, “Let’s say yes.”

“No problem,” says the driver. He punches the accelerator, and their backs bump against the seats. After a couple of blocks, he makes a sudden left onto a narrow street where only a pair of run-down restaurants, so chalky with fluorescent light they might be a chain of competing morgues, show any sign of occupancy. No lights follow them. The next right takes them onto an even narrower street, a vista of dark windows and padlocked gates except for a gaggle of hostess bars that signal their presence with pink neon and bored-looking clusters of evening-gowned girls, all curled hair and bare arms, sitting on plastic chairs. The cab turns right again and then makes another left immediately, this time onto a street parallel to Silom that runs behind a row of apartment houses, set above cavernous, sunken concrete garages. The driver peels, tires squealing, down a sloping driveway into one of the garages, takes a spiral ramp up one level, and then exits the garage on the front side of the building, which puts them on Silom again, a good mile or so from the restaurant.

“Nobody back there now,” he announces. “Where do you want to go?”

“Soi Pipat,” Rose says. Then she says, without turning to face Rafferty and Miaow, “Don’t ask me any questions, because I won’t answer them. I’ll talk when I’m ready.”

Rafferty says, “Sure, sure. I had a wonderful time.”

Miaow says, “You cut him.”

“I said no questions.”

“That wasn’t a question,” Miaow says.

This time Rose’s head snaps around. “Then what do you want, Miaow?” she demands. “Do you want me to agree with you? Fine, I agree with you. I cut him. Is there anything else on your mind?”

Miaow says, in English, “Jeez.”

“That goes for me, too,” Rafferty says.

“Both of you,” Rose says. “
Stop.
If you don’t stop, I’ll get out of this car and you’ll see me whenever you see me.”

The driver says, “Want me to pull over?”

There is a long pause, and then Rose says, “I guess not.”

They make the rest of the trip in a chilly silence. At the apartment house, Rose orders the driver to take them down into the underground garage and all the way to the elevator so they’re not exposed on the street. After Rafferty pays the man, he turns and sees their eighth-floor neighbor, Mrs. Pongsiri, gowned and made up for the night, coming out of the elevator, on her way to the bar she runs. She smiles at Rafferty, but it’s a puzzled smile, and he looks beyond her to see Rose holding the elevator door open for him. Miaow is pressed against the elevator’s back wall as though she wishes she could push herself through it. Clutched in Rose’s right hand is a steak knife.

THEY MOVE SILENTLY
through the apartment, turning on lights in every room: three people, Rafferty thinks, who look like they barely know each other. The air in the living room feels as thick as syrup. Miaow stalks into the kitchen and takes a Coke out of the refrigerator, pops it open defiantly in front of Rose, who would normally tell her to drink water instead, and heads for her bedroom, chin up and back stiff. The door closes behind her, not particularly gently.

Rose stands at the opening to the hallway, her eyes on the point where it ends at Miaow’s door. The knife dangles heavily in her hand, elongating the smooth muscles in her forearm. Rafferty wants to touch her, but she seems to be at the center of a sizzle of negative energy. If the lights went out, he wouldn’t be surprised to see sparks chasing each other over her skin.

“Sooner or later,” he says.

Rose says, “Later.” He can barely hear her. She shakes her head slowly, as though it weighs a great deal and it hurts her neck to turn it, and then she goes to the couch and sits heavily, leaning forward like someone who’s going to put her head between her knees until a spell of faintness passes. Instead she straightens and tosses the heavy steak knife onto the glass coffee table, which has the good sense not to break. She studies the knife for a long moment, looking like she can’t remember how it got there. When she shakes her head again, it’s a decisive side-to-side snap, bringing herself into the present, and she widens her eyes, blows out a big breath, and opens her big leather bag. She paws through the clutter until she comes up with a pack of Marlboro Lights.

Rafferty goes automatically to the sliding glass door that leads to the balcony and opens it. They’ve been on what he thinks of as a very limited health program: Rose has been trying to get them to drink their weight in water, and he’s been trying to rid the apartment’s atmosphere of some of its secondhand smoke. Standing in the flow of humid air from outside, he turns back to her and says, “I need to know whether we’re in danger. For Miaow’s sake, especially.”

“Yes,” Rose says. She strikes a match, takes an enormous drag, and holds on to it, then blows it out all at once. “Yes, if he finds us, we’re in danger.”

“What you’re not telling me,” Rafferty says. “What I’m not supposed to ask you about. If I know it, will it help me keep us safer?”

“No. You just need to know that he’ll kill me if he gets a chance. And he might try to get me through you and Miaow. But he can’t fly or lift automobiles or walk through walls. He can’t read minds. He’s a guy. He’s a very dangerous guy, but he’s just a guy.”

Rafferty hears a kind of compressed control in her voice that he’s never heard before. She’s fighting to keep it steady. “How good is he at finding people?”

“Good enough that I ran all the way to Isaan, and not to my own village either.”

Rafferty files that for later and says, “Does he know where your village is?”

“Yes. I told him everything, back then.”

Back when?
Rafferty thinks, but he knows the answer. “He’s military.”

“He’s worse than military. He’s crazy.”

“Always a good combination.” He turns again to look out across the city, glittering with the fraudulent optimism of big cities everywhere.

“Poke?” Rose says. He looks back to see her studying the tip of her cigarette. He waits, despite the fact that she seems disinclined to say anything else. He notices she doesn’t have an ashtray and gets the one that’s on the counter that separates the kitchen from the living room. He takes it to her and puts it beside the knife, then picks up the knife and carries it over to the counter and puts it where the ashtray was. He’s moving, he knows, just to be doing something, just to compensate for the words that aren’t being said, and he’s about thirty seconds away from rearranging furniture, so he goes back over to the table, pulls the white hassock close to the couch, and sits on it.

“You have to believe me,” Rose says. She is not looking at him, not even near him. She is looking at her knees. “I never, ever thought this would happen. I was absolutely sure it was over. I was sure he was dead. If he wasn’t dead, I knew he’d come back. And I
waited
for him to come back, for more than four years. Every time I got onto that stage at the King’s Castle, I thought I’d see him. Every time I turned a corner on the street, every time I went through a door at night, every time an elevator opened. Every time I went into my own room alone. Every time I saw a crowd of faces, I thought he’d be there. And he never was.” She checks the length of the cigarette in her hand and takes another drag, squinting against the thread of smoke.

“I used to dream that I’d flag down a taxi and get in back, and when the driver turned around, it would be him. I dreamed of a dark village where he was behind every house. He stepped out of mirrors, he bled through walls. He came up at me out of black water. Especially the water. He was always rising toward me through dark water.”

“He, him, him, him,” Rafferty says. “He’s got a name. Howard Horner. Why don’t you use it?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t even let myself think it. For years it was just ‘him.’ He was less real when I didn’t think his name.” She hears herself and almost smiles. “Like thinking or saying his name would bring him. Village-girl magic.”

Rafferty just waits.

“It took me a long time to let myself get close to you. When you came into the bar, when you started talking to me, I was still waiting. I’d already waited for years, and then, when I knew I wanted to be with you, I waited a few months more. And he still didn’t come. So, because I wanted to be with you, I made myself believe he was dead. If I hadn’t been able to do that, if I’d thought there was any chance he was alive, I never would have gotten involved with you.”

Miaow says from the hallway, “This is because of your old job, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Rose says, and sighs heavily. “It’s because I was dancing at the King’s Castle.”

“Not just dancing,” Miaow says.

“No, Miaow,” Rose says. She stubs out the cigarette. “Not just dancing. Thank you for reminding me of that.”

“I thought you went to bed,” Rafferty says.

“You were wrong,” Miaow says. “I went to my bedroom to drink a Coke and think about getting killed. And I came back out.”

“Well, you might as well come all the way in,” Rose says. “I’m not going to throw anything at you.”

Miaow trudges in but doesn’t get close to them. Instead she hugs the wall as she crosses the room, pulls out one of the stools at the kitchen counter, and sits. She puts the can of Coke down with a sharp sound.

Rose says, “I’m not contagious, Miaow.”

“Everything was all right,” Miaow says. She sounds like she does when she’s working on her lines for the play, as though she’s practiced what she wants to say, and she swivels the stool back and forth, not looking at either of them, just getting through it. “We were all happy. You had your business, Poke was making money from his book. My school was okay, there was the play.”

“There still is,” Rafferty says.

“And now there’s this,” Miaow says, finishing her speech as if no one had spoken. “Just when I think we can finally live like everybody else, without being
different
all the time. Without anybody chasing us. Without being frightened.”

“You don’t have to be frightened,” Rafferty says.

She gives him the look of pure, concentrated scorn that the lie deserves. “I saw that guy. And there wasn’t just one of them. There were two. Maybe there are a lot more.”

“There aren’t,” Rose says.

“You can’t know that,” Miaow says, and now she’s glaring at Rose. “I heard you talking to Poke. This happened when you were . . .
dancing
or whatever you call it. And you worked in the bar
four years
after the last time you saw him. You’ve been with Poke for five years now. How do you know he hasn’t got a hundred friends by now? How do you know anything?”

Rose leans back on the couch and looks regretfully at the smashed cigarette butt. Miaow’s gaze drops to a spot on the carpet about halfway across the room, but her mouth remains a tight line. Rafferty fights the urge to take hold of the conversation, try to turn it away from the black lake that seems to have opened up between them. All his instincts, developed by years of listening as his mother and father sharpened their razors on each other, push him toward trying to find a safe common ground, somewhere they can smile at each other and pretend that nothing happened tonight.

But he can’t do it.

“Miaow,” he finally says. “Nobody is happy about this. But either you can be polite to your mother or you can go back to your room.”

Miaow says, “Fine.” She grabs the Coke, downs what’s left in a single long series of gulps, and then tosses the empty can over the counter and onto the kitchen floor with a clatter that makes Rose straighten galvanically. Miaow pushes herself off the stool and leaves the room without a glance at either of them.