The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I can only get so much information from immigration,” Arthit says. He opens a cupboard, stares into it, closes it, opens another one, and takes down two thick mugs. “Noi kept them over there,” he says, nodding at the cabinet he’d opened first, “and I always look there.” He shakes his head. “Still getting used to things,” he says. “Anna also puts the utensils in a different drawer from the one I’m used to.” He opens a drawer and pulls out a splotchy, wooden-handled knife that has a blade about twelve inches long and two inches wide, with no point but a gleaming edge. “This was Noi’s favorite knife,” he says. “Hand-forged Japanese sword-quality steel, about three hundred US. So sharp you could use it as a straight razor.”

  “It’s not exactly a dazzler,” Poke says. “Looks like it was brought up from a shipwreck.”

  “It’s not stainless. Stainless chips when it gets thin, so it can’t take an edge like this. Look.” He slides the knife edge down his forearm, and when he shows it to Poke, it’s got little hairs on it. “Anna’s thrown it away three times.” He wipes it carefully on his shirt and puts it back into the drawer. “Getting used to things,” he says again.

  Poke says, “Immigration.”

  “Right, right. I can find out when he entered the country, what kind of visa. I can find out what he wrote on the immigration documents: where he arrived from, his passport number, whatever occupation he’s claiming.”

  “And where he’s staying. There’s a blank on the form for—”

  “Don’t be silly.” Arthit pulls the carafe off the hot plate and pours. “Anyone can write anything he wants on those things. You can make it up out of thin air.”

  “Wouldn’t his home address be on his passport?”

  “He could have moved a dozen times.” He hands Rafferty the mug. “Or, if he’s the kind of guy you think he is, who knows if it’s really his passport?”

  “Still,” Rafferty says. He sips the coffee. “It’s better than nothing.”

  Arthit says, “Let’s assume you’re right. Let’s say he’s after the money.” He goes to the door that opens into the tiny yard behind the house and pulls it open, and the room fills with the edgy, new-rain scent of ozone, one of Rafferty’s favorite smells.

  “He is,” Rafferty says. “He knows somehow that I was there, in Murphy’s house when it blew up, and he wants the money.”

  Arthit is standing at the small kitchen table, loading sugar into his coffee. “Kind of a shame you can’t just give it to him.”

  “You know I can’t. It belongs to Treasure. As badly as he treated her, she’s still his daughter, and the only thing I can do for her is make sure she eventually gets that money.”

  “Of course,” Arthit says. He takes a big breath. “Listen, about Treasure—”

  “And here’s the real issue,” Rafferty interrupts. “Even if I did give it to him, it wouldn’t solve the problem.”

  “Why not?” Arthit sits down and stirs his coffee.

  “Because,” Rafferty says, “he obviously thinks I have all of it. All three million eight hundred and forty thousand dollars of it. Which makes me more than three million short.”

  Two cups of coffee later, Arthit says, “I need to change the subject.”

  “By all means. This is what you wanted to talk about, back at that restaurant?”

  “It is.” He looks down into his empty cup. “How long since you’ve gone to see Treasure?”

  A pang of guilt yanks Rafferty’s spine straight. Treasure is the thirteen-year-old daughter of Haskell Murphy, who had tried brutally to transform her into a version of himself, bullying her, deriding her, and even beating her while half attempting to train her in the tactics of sabotage and terror. When Rafferty met her, the night Murphy’s house exploded, she’d been fiercely feral; when her father had been shot, she’d cried out, “Again, do it again!” Rafferty had assumed she’d died in the explosion, but in fact she’d taken refuge in a hedge behind the house. Two months later she’d been found, feverish and nearly starved, in an alley by two street kids who had hauled her to a shelter.

  And now Anna, the new love of Arthit’s life, is teaching at that shelter.

  “I haven’t seen her in more than a week,” Rafferty says. “The thing with Rose—”

  “Anna says Treasure has asked a few times where you were.”

  “Aaaahhhh, hell. I’ll go later today.”

  “She’s becoming a thirteen-year-old child instead of a small, violent adult,” Arthit says. He touches his wet spoon to the surface of the sugar in the bowl and then to his tongue. “I have to admit, I thought you were crazy when you decided she should stay at the shelter. I was thinking doctors, professionals, you know. But you were right. What she needed was kids. She’d never been around other children, and she didn’t trust adults, except for you. And now she’s hardly the same person.”

  “Thanks to Anna and Dok and Chalee,” Rafferty says. Dok and Chalee are the street children who found Treasure and got her to the shelter. They’d stayed with her through the first and hardest days and became the first friends she’d ever had.

  “Not so much Dok lately,” Arthit says. “He and Chalee had a fight a few days back. And Treasure’s got . . . well, an admirer.”

  “You mean since I was there? In a few days?”

  “He had a head start,” Arthit says. “It’s the kid whose face she scratched. He calls himself Tip.”

  “The one who sneaked in to look at her when he thought she was asleep?”

  “That’s the one. He’s got an eye. She’s beautiful.”

  “Her mother, Neeni, was gorgeous, even when I saw her, doped on codeine. Does Treasure reciprocate?”

  “She talks to him a little bit,” Arthit says. He shrugs. “Anna says she won’t cross the room to sit near him, but she stays put when he comes near her.”

  “Poor Dok,” Rafferty says. The scrawny little boy with the two big, ratlike front teeth is his favorite. “I think he was in love with Chalee.”

  “There will be other loves,” Arthit says. “Even with those teeth.” He’s put his cup on the table in front of him, and he’s turning it right and left, looking into it as though there’s someone down there signaling up to him.

  Rafferty says, “What is it?”

  “She’s different from the other kids in the shelter,” Arthit says. His face pales for a fraction of a second, reflecting a white flicker of lightning on the other side of the open kitchen door, but he doesn’t seem to register it. He’s choosing his words slowly, obviously picking his way across a subject that matters to him. He waits out a brief rattle of thunder before speaking. “Yes, she was abused physically and emotionally, and yes, her mother lived in a bottle of cough syrup and barely remembered her own name, but still, Treasure was—is . . . accustomed to a level of material comfort that the other kids can hardly imagine, and she reads and writes at a much higher level than they do. Anna is essentially running two classrooms at the same time: one for Treasure and one for everybody else.”

  Outside, Rafferty hears the rain begin to fall.

  “So,” Arthit says, and pauses. “Well, sooner or later I have to say it out loud: we’re thinking of asking her to come live with us.”

  Rafferty says, “Permanently?”

  “If she wants to,” Arthit says quickly. He looks past Poke, at him, and away again. “We’re considering adopting her. If she did decide to . . . to live with us for a while, sort of a trial period on both sides . . . well, it would give her everything at once. She’d have a nice place to live—here, I mean—and every day she could go back to the shelter with Anna and see her friends.”

  “She’d have a mother and father,” Rafferty says. He experiences a twinge of uneasiness at the idea of Treasure being able to relate to a father figure, even one as benign as Arthit, but a smile is called for, and he produces one. “It’s a wonderful idea.” />
  Arthit returns the smile, although it mirrors some of the anxiety Poke thought he’d concealed. “And later we could see to college and all that. Just, you know, a real life for her.” He reaches out and covers Rafferty’s hand with his. “I’m glad you think it’s all right. We were a little worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  “No, no, I said that wrong. I mean we were worried about both of you, Treasure and you. You were the first adult male she ever trusted. You were the first one who ever treated her like a child—like a human, for that matter—and you were the one who ended her relationship with her father—”

  “By killing him,” Rafferty says.

  Arthit makes a loose fist and raps the back of Rafferty’s hand, a call for attention. “He needed killing, and she knew it. And then, when she finally said something at the shelter after all those days, the first word she spoke was your name. You were the only person in Bangkok she asked for.”

  Poke says, “And?”

  “And I think she’s had it somewhere in the back of her mind that she might eventually be able to live with you and Rose and Miaow.”

  “Not possible,” Rafferty says. What Arthit said is no surprise. “I’ve got Rose and Miaow and the baby or babies to think about, and I can’t bring Treasure into all that. She’s still too unstable.”

  “Babies?”

  “You don’t even want to know.”

  Arthit tilts his head toward the door. “Listen to that come down.”

  “Flooding up in Rose’s village,” Poke says.

  They sit there, smelling the freshness of the rain. Poke says, “Arthit, I know how Treasure feels about me. It’s been bothering me, too, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Arthit says, “It’s a tough one. So does this . . . interfere with anything you had in mind?”

  “Only in the sense that I might be able to stop worrying about her.”

  “Then you think it might work? Treasure and Anna and me?”

  “I think if anybody can make it work, you can.” He sips some cold coffee. “But she’s a complicated kid.”

  “Anna loves her.”

  “Well, then, that’s about half of it, isn’t it?”

  Arthit says, “She’ll do everything she can to make Treasure happy. And I’ll be wise and fatherly, if I can figure out how.” They sit there in the warm, shining room, two friends who have come through a rough period and found each other again.

  And then Rafferty says, “Holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “Varney.”

  Arthit says, “Why would Varney—” He breaks off, and the rain outside crescendos. “We’re idiots. We haven’t given it a—”

  Rafferty is shaking his head. “He has no way of knowing she’s alive. Even if he thinks she might be, there’s . . . there’s no possibility he knows where she is. But if he wants the money, he might also want—”

  “Major Shen?” Arthit says. “Let’s say Varney was connected to Major Shen through Murphy—” He says, “No, no,” and shakes his head. “Even if Varney is in contact with Shen, Shen doesn’t know that Treasure turned up alive.” He’s looking at the back door again but not focused on it, nipping at the tip of his tongue. “Her mother?”

  “I suppose he might find her village,” Rafferty says. “If he knew Murphy well enough, he might know where in Laos she came from. But I never told Neeni that Treasure surfaced. It was so obvious that all she wanted to do in the world was drink herself to death. And Hwa—the Vietnamese maid who took care of Neeni when I was trying to get her off the dope—Hwa had no idea where Treasure was. And Varney would have to find Hwa even to learn that.”

  Arthit gets up. “Well, I’ll tell you what. This is the prod I need. Even if we’re certain that no one knows where she is, in light of all this . . . this bother, it seems like a good time to move her. And to check out Mr. Varney.” He picks up the cups and totes them to the sink and runs water into them.

  “Listen, Arthit.”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t . . . I mean, this thing with Treasure, with adopting Treasure. It isn’t going to be easy.”

  Arthit turns off the water. He says, “Easy is the last thing I think it’s going to be.”

  8

  Talks, Talks, Talks

  “No,” Anna says, packing a lot of opposition into the syllable.

  Arthit looks at Poke, who shrugs and looks at Boo. Rafferty has good reason to trust Boo’s judgment: Years ago, when Miaow was abandoned on the pavement by her parents, Boo—then using the street name “Superman”—had taken her into his gang of runaways and protected her. Just a few months ago, he acceded to Rafferty’s request that Treasure be allowed to stay in the shelter, even though Boo felt she might be a danger to the other kids. He seems to feel Rafferty’s eyes, and he glances over at him before he says, in Thai, “I think she can handle it.”

  “You don’t know who this man is,” Anna says to him. “You don’t know what their relationship was, if they had one. Even Poke doesn’t know. What if he’s like her father? What if she goes back . . .” She swallows, leaving unspoken the words they all hear: to the way she was.

  When, after a lifetime of deafness, Anna worked up the courage to abandon the sheaf of blue cards she had always written on and chose instead to speak aloud in front of strangers, her voice had seemed to Rafferty to be flat and mechanically unpleasant. She had never heard the way people emphasize some words and drop others, and she had to take many pronunciations on faith. Even now her sentences have a kind of chewed-and-swallowed sound to them, the stresses coming seemingly at random. But at the moment he doesn’t really register any of that. He just hears the love she so clearly feels for the child.

  It’s the tone Rose uses when she talks about the baby.

  He says, “I think he might be a danger to her.” Anna, watching his lips, starts to speak, but he holds up a hand. “We don’t even know if Varney is his real name. We don’t know much of anything. The less we know about him, the harder it’s going to be to protect her. Maybe she can give us the information we need.”

  Boo, sitting behind his rickety old desk in his little office at the shelter, a space that’s walled off by movable hospital-room dividers, says, “Up to you if you want to ask her about this man, but I don’t think you should say anything about adopting her until I talk to Father Bill and get him to say yes.”

  Arthit says to Boo, “What do you mean, ‘get’ Father Bill to say yes?”

  “He’ll start the process if she wants to do it,” Boo says. “But it’s complicated, and it takes a lot of his time. I don’t want to surprise him with it. He’s not good with surprises.”

  “I’m a policeman,” Arthit says, sounding stung. “Anna’s a teacher. We’d be great parents.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Boo says. “I’m just telling you how it is.” They’re all speaking Thai, Rafferty following along a couple of syllables behind and Anna turning to watch people’s lips. Now she reaches over and puts a hand on her husband’s shoulder, gives him a single calming pat that tells Rafferty quite a bit about how the intimacy between them has grown.

  “Sorry,” Arthit says. “I’m nervous.”

  “He is,” Anna says. She smiles at Arthit as though he were a child who just needs a little understanding from the grown-ups.

  Boo raises his voice and calls, “Chalee? Chalee, are you out there?”

  A thin girl with a strikingly angular fox face and quick, bright eyes pokes her head into the opening between the movable room dividers. “Now in here,” she says in English.

  “Can you get Treasure for us?”

  Chalee says, “Can,” and starts to retreat.

  “Wait,” Rafferty says, and Chalee freezes on the spot, her eyebrows raised inquisitively. “You know her better than anyone,” he says.

 
Chalee looks down at the floor, considering the sentence. “I guess.”

  “Have you been listening?”

  “Sure.” Chalee is giving her English some exercise.

  “Well, what do you think? Is she . . . I mean, has she gotten stronger?”

  Chalee says, “Yes.”

  “What if this is someone who frightens her? Do you think she can handle that?”

  Chalee looks at Boo and says, in English, “Boo say okay.”

  Boo says to Chalee, “You know her better than I do.”

  “You can’t ask a child to make this decision,” Anna says tartly. “You’re the expert.”

  “You’re the teacher,” Boo says. Chalee’s eyes go from one of them to the other.

  Arthit says, “Poke is the only one who knew her before.”

  Poke says, “Anyone else want to pass the buck?”

  Chalee says, “What’s a buck?”

  Rafferty says, “It’s a . . . it’s a something people . . . uh, pass to one another when . . . when—”

  “When they don’t want to make a decision,” Arthit says. “Like now.”

  “Well,” Chalee says, looking at Poke, “up to you.”

  “If it’s up to me,” Rafferty says, and takes a deep breath, “bring her in.”

  Chalee looks at Boo and then at Anna, sees no disagreement, and disappears between the partitions.

  After a moment’s silence, Arthit says to Boo, “If she says she wants to go, Father Bill will let us have her?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Boo says. “There’s legal stuff, and he’ll want to talk to both of you, too.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Whether you know what you might be getting into. Kids are a full-time job.”

  “I know that,” Anna says. “I understand children.”

  “I know, I know,” Boo says, “although Father Bill would say there’s no such thing as children, there’s just one kid at a time. Look, there’s nothing we can do about it now. We should all just relax.”