The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  The weather is always damp.

  She’s smoothing her hair with the palms of her hands as she strides into the condominium’s lobby, her high heels tick-tocking on the composite-stone floor. She’s short, although she prefers to think of herself as “compact,” and briskly energetic. A spark plug, her husband calls her. It’s the right temperament for Bangkok real estate, where every deal has nine prices and an infinite number of negotiables, plus built-in dodges and hidden trapdoors for both sides in the transaction.

  She has a spare half hour, which is unusual for her, and she’s decided to use it to check on the condo unit that Mr. Terwilliger, who’s supposed to arrive from Malaysia in three days, reserved for two weeks. In this market if a customer who’s planning to come to Bangkok sees a suitable unit on an agent’s website, he or she is well advised to put a hold on it by paying a month’s rent for a two-week hold or two months’ rent for a month. If the deal goes through, if the customer sees the place and likes it, a percentage of the money is put against the rent after the lease is signed, and in the meantime the unit is off the market: not advertised, not shown.

  But a unit left alone, even in a nice building, can get musty and stale-smelling. The damp has its way with things just as it has its way with Lamai’s hair. In her big purse, she’s got a bunch of clean, folded hand towels and an aerosol can of something that’s supposed to erase all unpleasant scents and replace them with the fragrance of an open meadow, although to Lamai it smells like ironing. Still, a pleasant smell.

  The moment she opens the door, she knows that something is wrong.

  There’s a very slight scent, clothes that have been worn once or twice too often in a hot, wet climate—socks, maybe, or shirts. And it’s too cool; the air-con was on only a few hours ago. As the door closes behind her, she thinks about opening it right back up again and leaving. Someone has been in here. The lock, she thinks. It’s cheap crap. Should have changed the lock. I should leave.

  But Lamai didn’t get where she is, didn’t buy the big four-bedroom unit by the river and the place on the beach in Rayong by being meek. After she stands and listens long enough to convince herself that no one else is in the place, she slips off a shoe and cracks the door open, sliding the shoe into place so the latch won’t engage. Just in case she has to make a quick exit.

  Carrying her other shoe in her hand, she checks the place out. The refrigerator is empty, but there’s a little spill of something on the second of its glass shelves. It’s sticky and smells of oranges, so it’s juice. The glass-topped table in the dining nook has been wiped sloppily; there are grains of salt near one edge. Things, Lamai thinks, a woman wouldn’t miss.

  Going into the bedrooms suddenly seems less like a good idea, but she squares her shoulders and does it anyway. The small one seems untouched, but the big one has definitely been used. Lamai employs one cleaning crew for all her rental units. They make a bed the way she tells them to, and this isn’t it. The closets are empty, but there are black markings, like graphite, on the top of the white horizontal wooden rods, and Lamai has cleaned them often enough to recognize them as having been made by clothes hangers sliding back and forth. When her crew finishes a job, those are scoured away. In the bathroom sink near the drain, a few tiny hairs, very short, the kind left by someone who shaves his face or his head.

  Lamai runs her finger around the drain and peers at its tip. Black hairs.

  It seems like an excellent idea to leave. Let her office’s strong-arm guys, kept in reserve for renters who don’t pay, handle it. She pulls out her phone.

  He’s halfway down the hall when he sees the shoe.

  The newspapers under his arm crackle when he moves. Standing stock-still, he transfers them to his left hand. In the computer case, he has both a small automatic and a Cold Steel Black Bear fighting knife, almost six hundred dollars retail, with an eight-inch blade that can cut through thick leather as though it were cheese.

  He hears a woman’s voice from inside the unit and slowly unzips the case.

  The light coming around the open edge of the door dims and brightens and dims again: someone moving between it and the window. He makes a decision and closes the bag. A death here will be a problem. The doormen know him by sight. The real-estate agent has his name. Whoever is inside won’t be a sex worker or a street child or even a half-senile farang. Whoever is inside will belong here. Someone with juice.

  By the time Lamai slips her foot back into the shoe and comes through the door, he’s barreling down the fire stairs. Half an hour later, he’s walking the sidewalk outside Regent International School and thinking, Perfect.

  32

  Nein, Nein, Nein

  “It’s perfect,” Rafferty says, trying to convince himself.

  Arthit looks down at the diagram that Rafferty has made. Miaow’s school takes up most of a short block, with a scattering of commercial establishments on each side. The entrance sits at the apex of a T-junction, running along the horizontal stroke of the T. It’s an Italicized T because the vertical stroke runs into the horizontal at an angle of about eighty percent.

  “One-way,” Rafferty says, running a pencil along the street at the top of the T. “The kids get dropped in front, here.” He taps the juncture of the two streets, only a few yards from the school’s entrance. “This street,” he says, indicating the vertical part of the T, “is also one-way, traffic coming toward the school. You can only arrive from these two directions, and you can only leave in this one direction.” He runs the pencil along the street the school is on. “It’s like Anna’s fish traps—easy to get in, hard to get out. If you need the quickest route to a two-way street, you have to keep going past the school and turn right, here. Then it’s two blocks to Sathorn Road.” He draws a line along the narrow street, four shops and a couple of restaurants away from the school. “One car could block it.”

  “Blocking streets,” Arthit says neutrally. He picks up his hotel coffee and puts it down untasted. The two of them are at the small dining-room table in the hotel suite. It’s midmorning, Friday. Rose is down in the hotel coffee shop, letting her pregnancy-sharpened food preferences guide her through the menu, and Miaow, who has been excused from the first few hours of school, is on an assignment from Rafferty, talking to Treasure at the shelter. It keeps her out of school for the time being, which seems wise, and will also allow her to run a second errand for Rafferty in an hour or two. She’s being driven and guarded by Arthit’s former cop.

  Rafferty says, “You probably won’t need to block it.”

  “Well, good. Because that’s official stuff, closing streets, and we’re not out to draw attention. It’s a small operation to catch the guy who committed that murder in Pattaya, and that’s all. If you and Treasure and Murphy and Murphy’s money get brought up, warning lights are going to blink all over the place, and they’ll wake up the Thai antiterror people, the Americans, and whichever cops or firemen stole the rest of Murphy’s cash. You’ll have new problems.”

  Rafferty nods, but he’s barely listening, lost in his diagram. “There’s no other usable entrance to the campus,” he says. “Everybody has to come in here, in front, between the administration building and this first block of classrooms.” He slides the diagram aside to reveal an overhead view from Google Earth, fuzzy but readable. “This is the auditorium, about forty meters from the entrance. At an angle, linked by this sidewalk. The sidewalk is exposed. Anyone stationed in front of the auditorium would see Varney coming, if he’s not in a big group. Your plainclothesman with the picture from the Pattaya passport will be at the entry door, looking at everyone who comes in, and then he’ll go out and watch the sidewalk. And one of your people is making a new picture, right? Without the mustache and the hair.”

  Arthit says, “Yes, but he’s not going to come into the auditorium. Whatever happens, it’ll happen on the perimeter of the school. Out front.”

  “I agree, bu
t still. So look. If you’re facing the place from the front, the sides of the campus to the left and right butt up against solid blocks of shops and restaurants all the way down to the next street. See? Here and here, with no space between them. The only way to get into the school that way is over the shops’ roofs, and even then you’d hit the chain-link fence that surrounds everything except the front entrance. The only other functional way is a gate at the back of the school, opening onto the block behind, to the lot where the teachers and administrators park.” He makes an X on the far side of the diagram. “About twenty spaces. You get in through a remote-keyed gate, just a sliding section of the chain-link. The gate is the same height as the fence, which is about ten feet, so even if someone climbs over it to get into the school, he’s not going to be able to leave that way hauling someone else along. He’ll have to come out through the front.”

  “And if he’s got a remote?” Arthit says.

  “He still has to use that sidewalk to get into the auditorium.”

  Arthit says, “Everything always looks so neat on paper. Still, I think you’re right. It’ll happen in front.”

  “So that’s the where,” Rafferty says, “and I think the when is after the play.”

  “My guy will take Miaow into the school, through the back, when she’s finished with Treasure,” Arthit says. “He’s got a remote. She’ll be on the floor of the car, and he’ll bundle her out and take her inside to her homeroom teacher. Once she’s safely inside the school, she stays there all day, out of sight from the sidewalks. No in and out, no chance to get snatched until evening. I think the period before the play, when the audience is arriving, is safe, because we’re going to have Anand, in uniform, directing traffic as people come in. After everyone is gone, he’ll take off, creating a nice, police-free zone. So that leaves after the play.”

  “And we’ll control the exposure of the audience at that point,” Rafferty says. “We’ll go back and congratulate Miaow and stand around for fifteen or twenty minutes until most of the parents are gone, and then we’ll hold people back for a few minutes so we go can out alone. That has to be when he’ll make his move.”

  “It still frightens me to death,” Arthit says. “The man is crazy.”

  “Me, too. But we’re forcing the action to a specific time and place. We’ll have Anand, out of uniform, waiting around the corner. Your off-duty guys will have done a couple of very discreet street sweeps, nothing to frighten him away, and then they’ll be on call and close at hand.”

  Arthit says, “I think we should do more street surveillance. Who knows? Maybe they’ll spot him and grab him.”

  “Here’s my problem. He’s going to kill someone. He promised me he would, and that very night he either beat up Wallace and left him for dead or stood back while someone else did it, if the woman who called the hospital got it right. If he spots surveillance and leaves, someone is going to die.”

  “I wish I liked it better.”

  Rafferty puts the pencil down. “Both of us do.”

  Arthit says, “And we can’t just leave him out there, sniffing after Treasure, because eventually he’ll find her. If there were a way to draw him anywhere else, I’d cancel this whole thing.”

  “We’d have to set that up. This is perfect. If he saw the story, he verified that the play was running and who is in it. We couldn’t have created it, not without months of preparation.”

  “Maybe he didn’t even see the newspaper story.”

  “I did. You did. Everybody I know did. Mrs. Shin says the father of one of the kids is part owner of the World, and he calls in favors for the school once or twice a year.”

  “I still hate the whole thing,” Arthit says.

  The two of them sit there, their eyes on the map Rafferty has drawn. It looks imprecise and amateurish, a diagram of disaster.

  “We haven’t got an alternative,” Arthit says. “But it’s stupid to get innocent people hurt.” He tucks his forefinger under his thumb and then flicks Rafferty’s map. “We’ve taken care of the audience members, but do all those old guys have to come?”

  “You try to talk them out of it,” Rafferty says.

  * * *

  “No,” Hofstedler says. “No, no, nein, nein, nein.”

  Campeau says from his stool, “We’re going.”

  “I bought a tie,” Pinky Holland says.

  Hofstedler says, “And Wallace is going. This he is not missing.”

  “We’re all going,” says Campeau. “Son of a bitch screwed with the wrong bunch.”

  There are manly mutters from around the bar. Hofstedler says, “We go with you or we go without you.”

  “Then I’m telling all of you,” Rafferty says, “to be at the hotel at seven. Anyone who’s not there will be left behind. And if you show up solo, you’ll be arrested.” This claim is sheer bravado; they’re not going to run around arresting people if there’s a chance Varney is watching.

  “I was going to go from home,” Hofstedler complains. “With Wallace. It is not so far.”

  “You’re going with me,” Rafferty says, “or you’re not going.”

  Arthit stands on the rungs of his stool, clears his throat, and waits for everyone to look at him. “I haven’t met most of you,” he says, “so you don’t know, first, that this is a police operation and, second, that I’m the ranking cop. This man has killed three people we know of—a tourist, a woman, and a child—and we’re sure there are more. The only reason you’re invited is that you’re pig stubborn and this is the only way we can control you. But I warn you, Mr. Rafferty’s view on how the operation should run is also the official police view. Arrive with the group or stay home. If you don’t all arrive together at the proper time, if you straggle in individually, there’s the chance that Varney or one of his thugs could grab you and turn it into a hostage situation. You will arrive in the two cars Mr. Rafferty has arranged. Once you’re on the school grounds, you’ll follow the directions you’re about to hear. If things start going wrong, Mr. Rafferty and I have the weight of the law on our side, and you will do what we tell you to, and quickly. Now, is there anyone who can’t live with that?”

  No one says anything.

  Behind the bar, Toots applauds the speech.

  “Great, I guess,” Arthit says. He looks at his watch. “Almost three.” To Rafferty he says. “Try to make this sound good.”

  Rafferty explains the rules.

  He’s already hot and tired and angry, and he has hours and hours to go.

  He’s been there since the middle of the night, except for a couple of hours’ sleep at a “number hotel,” that fading Bangkok tradition for adulterous liaisons: the room is directly above the garage, with a stairway going up into it, so once the room is rented there’s no need to go to the front desk or to haul your honey down a hallway. There’s a curtain that can be rolled down in the garage to hide the customer’s car from prying eyes. Checking in, he’d used the Étienne Bressac passport, acquired from a Frenchman he’d met in Phnom Penh and with whom he’d returned to Bangkok, so Bressac’s visa is still as valid as Varney’s. Bressac is in no position to complain.

  The number hotel is a perfect place to take a hostage, which is what he intends to have at the end of the day. He can’t understand why he didn’t think of it before.

  Rafferty is just another farang without influence, so it’s unlikely his plight would interest the police sufficiently for them to give him a hand. Still, Varney is certain that someone, probably an amateur or amateurs, will be watching for him, and even if by some miracle they’re not, it’s better to behave as though they are. So his first priorities were to survey the landscape, which he did Thursday immediately after leaving the condominium, and arrange places from which he can watch without drawing attention.

  As a longtime hunter of animals and people, he recognizes the importance of a blind. After his first
look at the somewhat downscale neighborhood that houses the Regent International School, he’d burned through a lot of time and energy to buy a cheap Nissan compact in Bang Na, paying in cash with a bit extra to compensate for the fact that Étienne Bressac hadn’t held an international driver’s license. The car’s body looks okay, and the windows are darkly tinted, which is essential, but the engine is a wreck. He’d driven the area for hours, the valves hammering, until he managed, in the middle of the night, to park it facing the school about halfway up the one-way street that runs up to the narrower street that forms the top of the T-junction. Then he took advantage of the darkness to pull out the Black Bear and slash the front tire on the traffic side to explain its being stuck there. Finally he put one of those folding reflective sunshades under the windshield. He’s cut several pop-out holes into the sunshade so he’ll be able to sit there without presenting a human silhouette, in an apparently disabled car, which any cop would look at once or twice and automatically discard as a potential escape vehicle. Blind number one.

  He’s also located his second and third blinds, two small restaurants that have plate-glass windows through which he can look down the slanting street toward the front of the school. One of them is only a few yards from the car and faces west, which means the owners have thoughtfully tinted their own window against the afternoon heat.

  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.