“Right, right,” Arthit says, sitting back in the chair, his spine rigid. He notices his bouncing leg and quiets it, but he’s still radiating tension as Chalee comes in, followed by Treasure.
At first sight it’s difficult for Rafferty to see in this girl the furious, terrified child in the filthy nightgown he’d met that night in Murphy’s house. She’d carried her shoulders in a tight, permanent flinch, arms pressed to her sides as though to make her smaller. Her thick, dark, reddish hair had been a concealment, a tangled thicket that she pulled forward to surround and hide her face like a snarl of thorns. She had moved with the tamped-down, ever-present wariness of someone who expects a slap to be waiting around every corner. At the height of the violence that had erupted that night, she’d run from the room and methodically soaked the house with gasoline. Then she’d set it ablaze. Her movements now are fluid, not precisely confident, but without her former hesitation. The stiffness in her neck and back is mostly gone, just a hint of rigidity in the set of her shoulders. She’s gained weight, and her hair has been tamed, pulled back from her face and pinned in place by two red plastic heart-shaped clips, something he never would have associated with her, even more surprising than the used, street-child shorts or the bright T-shirt featuring four guitar-carrying anime Japanese teenage girls. Looking at her now, Rafferty realizes that he might not have recognized her in the street.
She surveys the room quickly and—out of habit, Rafferty thinks—holds no one’s gaze. She nods respectfully at Anna, who has become her teacher. Her eyes slow when they reach Rafferty, and she gives him a small, almost unintentional smile, ducking her head a bit awkwardly, and then she stops, just a few steps inside the room, waiting.
Rafferty says, “Hello, Treasure.”
She looks at him again for a split second and then away, and Boo breaks into the moment, saying, “Sit down, Treasure. We want to talk to you for a minute. Thank you, Chalee.” Chalee, looking disappointed, goes out of the room, although probably not out of earshot. Boo parts his long hair with his hands, snags it behind his ears, and waits, looking at each of them.
Rafferty says to Treasure, “How are you?”
In spite of Boo’s invitation, Treasure hasn’t taken a chair. Instead she stands beside one, keeping it between her and the others, her hands grasping its back with one raised knee resting on the seat. Although Rafferty asked the question, she looks first at Boo and then at Anna, who smiles encouragement at her, and she says, very softly, “I’m fine.” She seems to search for words for a second, rocking the chair a little on its back legs, and then surprises Poke by saying, “How are you?” She’s speaking English, her father’s native language. She glances at Anna again and gets a nod of approval.
“I’m fine, too,” he says, unprepared for the question. He clears his throat. “We want . . . I mean, we need to talk to you about something.”
Her voice taut, Anna says, “I still don’t know about this.”
The moment Anna says it, Rafferty realizes that he agrees with her. He says, “Maybe we don’t need to talk about it yet.”
Treasure says, “Did I do something wrong?” She turns to Boo so quickly that the chair squeals on the floor. “Do I . . . do I have to leave? Can’t I stay here?”
“No,” Boo says, both hands upraised. “Nothing like that. Nobody wants you to leave.”
“Then what?” Treasure says. She swallows loudly enough for Rafferty to hear her across the room. “What did I do?”
“Okay,” Rafferty says. “Listen, the first thing you need to know is that you haven’t done anything wrong and that we all love you and we’re all going to stay with you and . . . and take care of you.”
She says, “Then what is it?”
With absolute certainty that he’s handling this badly, Rafferty says, “Did you ever meet a man named Arthur Varney?”
Treasure’s gaze drops to the floor, and she’s still for the space of several breaths, seeming to work the question through. Then, without looking up, she says, “You mean, with my, my—” She shakes her head as though clearing it. “My father?”
“Yes.”
“Arthur Varney,” she says experimentally. She looks at each of them and says, “No.”
“He’s shorter than I am,” Rafferty says. “Kind of . . . not fat, but . . .” He spreads his hands. “Wide. Like he’s got muscles, like one of those guys who’s into showing off his muscles. Forty years old, maybe a little more.”
Treasure relaxes a bit, leans away from the chair, her hands grasping the back. “American?”
“Yes. He sounds American anyway.”
“My, my, my father, he didn’t have friends. Only people he yelled at. I don’t know who you mean.”
“He’s American, a little older than I am but younger than your father, black hair. He’s got a big mustache—”
He breaks off because Treasure’s head has snapped up. Now she’s looking past him, as though at a light over his shoulder, a long distance away. Her mouth is slightly open. After a moment she rubs her right index finger over the skin of her left forearm, just above the wrist. She says, “Snake?”
He nods.
With no warning at all, she plants both feet on the floor and drags the chair a few steps back, keeping it in front of her, tilted so that its rear legs point at them like gun barrels. The self-possessed girl who came into the room is gone. Her shoulders are raised and rigid, almost as high as her ears. The knuckles on the fingers curled over the chair back are paper white. She tilts her face downward as though she still expects the tangled curtain of hair to drop forward and hide it, glancing at them, one at a time, out of the corners of her eyes.
Everyone in the room can hear her breathing.
Rafferty says, “Treasure,” and she hauls the chair another quick step back, its legs making a ragged noise against the floor. Anna is up and moving toward her, but Treasure stops her with a glance. So deliberately that it looks mechanical, she turns her face toward Rafferty again, showing him the expressionless mask of muscle she had worn in the presence of her father. She lifts her right hand and uses the side of her index finger to blot her upper lip. Her hand is shaking. “Talks, talks, talks?”
“That’s him.”
“Not Arthur,” she says. The only thing moving in her face is her lower lip, which is trembling. “Name is . . . is . . . is P-P-Paul. Paul something.” She turns to look through the doorway Chalee just left through. “He’s . . . he’s here?”
“No, he’s nowhere near us. Please. Sit down.”
“He can’t come here,” she says.
Rafferty says, “He won’t.”
“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 ba
ck 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, Go
od 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.
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