A Nail Through the Heart pr-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  "And the guard knew where the safe was."

  "Helped to dig the hole. He'd worked there almost twenty years."

  "He let these guys in after twenty years in the house? Doesn't say much for loyalty."

  "Madame Wing isn't someone who inspires much loyalty."

  Rafferty is lying full length on the couch, trying to find somewhere to rest his weight that doesn't hurt. Late-afternoon sun slants malevolently through the sliding glass door. Miaow has not come home from school yet, and the boy is off somewhere. Probably sharpening his teeth.

  "You there?" Arthit asks.

  "Just lolling around. It may be hard for you to imagine, Arthit, just how leisurely my life actually is."

  "What could be in a cardboard envelope that's worth a million baht?"

  "For all I know, it's her diary. This is not a woman with a sunny past."

  "Does the guard have a way to reach Chouk?"

  "He says not. Says Chouk will call him when the money's ready."

  "Trusting soul, isn't he?" Arthit says.

  "He's barely sentient."

  "Are you going to tell Madame Wing about this?"

  "I don't know," Rafferty says. "They really beat the shit out of him, and that was when they only suspected he was involved."

  "So what's the next move?"

  "We assume he's going to get paid."

  "Why? Chouk's other little helper got killed."

  "Whatever was in that safe, I think Tam got shot because he saw it. The guard got off the property and stayed off. He didn't see anything."

  "So we watch the guard," Arthit says. "Wait for the payoff."

  "Can you do that without attracting too much attention?"

  "Sure. I'll assign Cho to it." Cho is Arthit's brother-in-law, a chubby, sweet-natured boy who took a degree in library science and then decided to be a policeman. The career move had been a mistake. "It's perfect for Cho. He can sit in one place and eat noodles in the car, and all he has to do is make a phone call when the subject starts to move. Does the guy move around much? If he's more mobile than, say, the average couch, Cho will probably lose him."

  "At the moment he can barely make it to the bathroom. Who'll watch when Cho goes off?"

  "I'll take care of that. I still have a fragile, if deteriorating, network of personal alliances at my disposal."

  "I'm sorry about all this, Arthit," Rafferty says dutifully.

  "Just keep your eyes open. My two colleagues probably aren't finished with you."

  "No problem," Rafferty says. "I'll sic the boy on them."

  The minute Rafferty hangs up, the phone rings. The screams of children in the background identify the caller as Hank Morrison before he can even say hello.

  "Poke. Let's get together."

  "What about the prospective parents?" Rafferty tries another position on the couch and rejects it.

  "We're in the ooh and aah phase. It'll last a couple of days. You want to get this started?"

  "More than anything in the world."

  "When? I'll need at least two or three hours, Poke, one with the two of you and one or two with each of you alone. Not today, though," Morrison says. "I'm jammed. How about tomorrow afternoon?"

  "Give me an hour after she gets home from school. Say, four, four-thirty. Is there anything I should bring?"

  "Your passport, visa, whatever you've got. Something to show you're solvent-a year's worth of bank statements ought to do it."

  "No problem." Thanks in part to the shudderiferous Madame Wing.

  Morrison says, "Hold on," and Rafferty hears the phone hit the desk. A moment later the voices of the children are muted, and Morrison comes back on the line.

  "Had to close the door," he says. He clears his throat. "Poke, don't take any of this wrong, okay?"

  "Any of what?"

  "Of what we're about to discuss. Is she a virgin?"

  The muscles in Rafferty's shoulders go rigid. "I have no idea," he says stiffly.

  "She's going to be examined, Poke. Medically, I mean. Most of the time, there aren't any snags, if only because there are so many ways a hymen can be broken accidentally, but any sign of repeated sexual activity-"

  "As I said, I have no idea."

  "You've never talked about it with her?"

  "We've talked about everything in the world except that."

  "Well, I'm going to have to talk to her about it."

  "Good luck," Rafferty says, imagining the set of Miaow's mouth when she's planted her feet.

  "You've got to tell her to answer me," Morrison says. "Tell her how important it is, that we could have problems if we don't know the truth. And that includes you, Poke. You've never touched her improperly, have you?"

  "Hank, if it were anybody but you, I'd come over there and slice you from gut to gullet and put in a defective zipper."

  "I have to ask you the question. I'll have to ask her, too."

  Rafferty's heart is hammering in his ears. "If you have to, you have to."

  "Poke, how emotional are you about the possibility that she's been abused in the past?"

  "No more emotional than anyone else would be."

  Morrison pauses. "Which is to say what?"

  "Which is to say I'll kill anybody who messed with her."

  "That's what I was afraid of. Look, I can either tell you what she says in our interview or not tell you. Which would you prefer?"

  He weighs it for a moment. "Don't tell me. I want to hear it from her, when she's ready."

  "What's your gut feeling?"

  "I think, at the very least, people have tried." He tells Morrison about Miaow's defensive reaction when she is hugged too quickly or when she does not initiate it.

  "Aaaahh," Morrison says. "It doesn't necessarily mean anything. Some of the most abused kids are also the most physically affectionate. They've learned it's the best way to manipulate adults."

  "Well, that's not Miaow. Miaow manipulates adults by having the strongest will since Margaret Thatcher. Strong enough to talk me into putting up with Superman."

  "On a temporary basis, I hope."

  "Until I can figure something else out."

  "Poke, you're not the first person to try to help that kid. He's had a lot of chances."

  "Oh, please, Hank. Compared to who?"

  "You can't think about these children in the same way you think about American kids. Compared to a lot of the little lost souls abandoned on the streets of Southeast Asia, that's compared to who."

  "We're getting along fine," Rafferty says, and the door to the apartment opens and the boy walks in. He has the worst black eye Rafferty has ever seen, something straight out of the "Our Gang" comedies. The scrape on his forehead is a crust of brown, but his long hair is clean and neatly brushed. It falls over the damaged eye with a sort of Veronica Lake effect. He waves stiffly at Rafferty, as though the gesture is new to him, and Rafferty returns the wave.

  "He's a good kid to have on your side in a fight," Rafferty continues, making a fist and pretending to hit himself in the jaw. The boy laughs. Rafferty tells Morrison about the attack the previous evening, making it sound like a random mugging. He smiles at the boy and gets one in return. Superman sits on the carpet, waiting for Rafferty to finish. He fidgets from side to side. He looks eager about something.

  "Well, be careful of him," Morrison says. "Don't give him a chance to steal from you."

  "I'm not worried about that. It's just stuff."

  "That's either a noble statement or a stupid one. Bye, Poke."

  Rafferty hangs up the phone and looks at the boy. The boy looks expectantly back at Rafferty, as though he is waiting for something. Rafferty feels his smile go stale, and he sees something like disappointment come into the boy's eyes. Finally, just the tiniest of gestures, the boy turns his head an eighth of an inch toward the opposite wall and lifts his chin.

  Rafferty looks in the indicated direction. His fax has a paper tray attached to it.

  "You fixed it!" Rafferty jumps to
his feet and practically runs to the fax. The paper tray is in place, firmly anchored and ruler straight. He turns to the boy.

  "I fixed the ring, too," the boy says shyly. "Now it only rings twice before it answers."

  "This thing has been broken for months."

  "Easy," the boy says. He is looking at the carpet.

  Rafferty starts to hug him and then slaps his hands together instead. There are probably twenty ways to handle this, and nineteen of them are wrong. He goes through at least seventeen of them mentally before he says, "How much do you know about garbage disposals?"

  Sok Pochara is having an unusual day.

  He has been driving the cab since 6:00 A.M. His first fare, a farang man, threw up in the backseat, reminding Sok that it is rarely a good idea to pick up someone who is flagging you on all fours. After Sok cleaned the cab, he picked up the fat twins, two men in their forties who looked exactly alike, dressed exactly alike, and talked exactly alike. They could barely squeeze into the back of the cab. When he dropped them off, they split the fare exactly and tipped precisely the same amount, which is to say zero. They were followed by a ladyboy in an all-white wedding gown with sparkles on it who was weeping uncontrollably and who jumped out of the cab at a stoplight without paying him. The cab is still sweet with his/her perfume when he picks up the girl with the two big suitcases.

  Airport, he thinks as he pulls to the curb, barely beating out two other cabs. He loads her luggage, as heavy as he is, into the trunk, gets back into the cab, and says, "Where?"

  "Anywhere," she says. "Just drive."

  "That could get expensive," he says, and she reaches forward and drops a thousand-baht bill on the seat beside him. "I'll drive," Sok says.

  Half an hour passes. Sok decides to see how many times he can cross the river without covering the same ground twice. The meter says 820 baht when the girl's cell phone rings.

  "Hello?" she says. Then she listens for a long minute. Then she says, "I understand," and leans forward and says to Sok, "Stop here."

  Sok pulls to the curb and starts to get out to help her with the suitcases, but she says, "Wait," and hands him another 500 baht. "Stay here," she says. "In a minute you'll see me talking to a man. When we finish, he'll get into the cab, and you take him anywhere he wants to go. When he gets out, he will take my suitcases with him."

  Another one, Sok thinks. Maybe I should be doing construction work.

  Within seconds, a cab pulls up to the curb in front of them, and Sok watches as a man gets out. He is short and dark, and there is something wrong with one of his hands. He waves his cab away with the bad hand, and when it has disappeared in traffic, the young woman gets out of Sok's cab. The man gives her a big envelope and comes toward Sok's cab. He gets in and says, "Drive."

  Sok lets him out in Pratunam twenty minutes later. The man melts into the crowd, pulling the suitcases.

  An hour after that, Madame Wing tears open the envelope and sinks her nails into the maid's eyes.

  29

  Send Me Number 57

  Madame Wing does not telephone to demand an update that night. Rafferty calls anyway to report that he has identified the Cambodian man, but Pak says she is too busy to come to the phone. "Nothing else is happening," Rafferty says.

  "According to you," Pak says mysteriously, and hangs up.

  "Why do I have the feeling," Rafferty asks Rose, "that things are being kept from me?"

  Rose is settled at Rafferty's desk, doing her business accounts. She has a pencil in her hand, another behind her ear, and a hank of hair between her teeth, usually a prelude to some frustrated pencil chewing. Twice a week she writes down in a ledger every baht she has earned and every baht she has spent-for food, rent, shampoo, soap, clothing, pink plastic hair clips, donations at the temple, money sent to her family, and-finally-her business expenses: tuk-tuk fares, advances to the women, new T-shirts and jeans for their interviews, cell-phone charges. The exercise does little for her mood.

  "When I think of all the money I threw away when I was dancing," Rose says, studying the numbers on the page, "I could scream."

  Rafferty looks at the familiar terrain of her profile, at the play of light on her hair, at her straight back and at the smooth skin over the curve of her neck. At the carefully ironed shirt she wears tucked in to her jeans because the bottom is frayed and it embarrasses her. "I haven't heard you scream in a while."

  "Since you gave me that money, I have nine thousand baht in the bank," she says, ignoring him. "A little more than two hundred dollars. Do you think I should send some of it home?"

  "Save it for a rainy day," he says in English.

  "Poke," she says gently in Thai, "it rains nearly every day."

  A wave of longing, mixed with something like loneliness, washes over him. "All the more reason," he says, also in Thai.

  "I'll send them five thousand. Half and a little bit. That will make them happy."

  "You make a lot of people happy, Rose."

  She says nothing. Rafferty can almost see the words hanging in the air between them. He feels the same breathless awkwardness he experienced in junior high, when he first asked a girl for a date. The stillness in the room presses in on him like water.

  "Rose-"

  "Don't confuse me, Poke," she says. She closes the ledger with a soft pop. She still has not turned to face him.

  "I'm not trying to confuse you."

  She waves the words off. "But you are. You're making me think too much. And don't tell me I said I'd think about it. I am thinking about it." The chair's hinged back creaks when she leans away from the desk, as though she wants to be farther from the ledger and the numbers it contains. Her right hand tightly grips the arm of the chair. "We were fine until you started. We got along, we laughed, we didn't…we didn't ask questions. I was comfortable here. Now you want to change everything-adopt Miaow, bring the boy in, marry me. You do want to marry me, don't you?"

  "Well, I…yes. Sure. That's why I asked."

  She leans back some more and then straightens. For a moment he thinks she is not going to answer him. "Getting married is much more complicated than just sleeping with me."

  "Why?" He thinks he knows some of the answers, but they have to talk about them sometime.

  She breathes out sharply in exasperation and turns to him. "How far is it from me to you right now?"

  This is not what he expects. "I don't know. Six, eight feet."

  She throws the pencil onto the desk. "It's a million miles, Poke. And more than miles. It's what we believe, what we've done, who we are. What we need to do."

  "If it's that far," he says, trying to make light of it, "we should get started early."

  She claps her hands, just once, to get his full attention, and he feels his shoulders straighten. "Listen to me. You're a fine-looking man. You're sweet. You have a good heart. Any woman in her right mind would be happy you asked. I don't know, Poke. Maybe you should ask one of them." She gets up and walks to the sliding doors and then past them, the city lights framing her.

  "That's silly, Rose. This isn't a raffle. I don't want anyone except you."

  "And I suppose I want you." She stops in midstride and gives him both eyes in a gaze that seems to focus about four inches beneath his skin. "But that may not be enough."

  Rafferty wants to stand, too, but he is afraid to. The connection between them is suddenly so tenuous that almost anything could sever it: a disturbance in the air, a beam of light coming in through the window. And, fragile as it is, it's a bridge he has to cross. "If that's what we have, it's what we have," he says. "And I'll do whatever it takes to make it enough."

  "I know you'll try. But can you do it? I don't know. And I don't know whether I can either."

  Rafferty starts to reply, but the words are carried away by a cold breeze that seems to blow straight through him. He can feel his heart contract. He has made a tremendous mistake. He's been so focused on Miaow that he hasn't taken the time to look at all of this from Rose's pe
rspective.

  Or even to recognize that he doesn't have the faintest idea what Rose's perspective is.

  The room, with all its familiar features, suddenly feels like someplace he's never seen before. An unknown place in an unknown country.

  His hands are in mid-air before he knows consciously what he is going to do. He brings his hands together, palm to palm in a gesture of prayer, to make a wai. He raises the wai face high to express respect and says, "Forgive me."

  Keeping her eyes on his, she turns her head slightly to the left, as though she might be able to see him more clearly this way. She looks wary. After a moment she says, "I have forgiven you many times. What am I forgiving now?"

  "I'm an American," he says. "As much as I love you, as much time as I've spent here, I'm still an American. And I've made the classic American mistake."

  She doesn't even blink. "Which is?"

  "To think that everybody is really just like us, even if they don't act that way. Or that they want to be like us, they would be like us if they could just shake off all the stuff that makes them seem different." He is choosing his words anxiously, picking one, discarding others, knowing how limited his Thai is, how unequal to this challenge. He hadn't worried about it until this moment, convinced that the most important part of the conversation would be heart-to-heart. But now he knows he doesn't understand Rose's heart either.

  "If it's really a million miles from me to you," he says, "please help me to cross it."

  Rose pulls her head back fractionally, less than an inch, as though she has been struck by something very soft. Her hands go into the pockets of her jeans, and she stands there, considering, while Rafferty holds his breath. Then she says, "I believe in ghosts, Poke. Do you?"

  "I don't know."

  "I believe that trees and stones have spirits living in them. I believe that people have light inside them, even the worst people. I believe that the lives we are living now lead us to our next life, and the lives we led before led us to this one. Do you believe in your next life, Poke?"