“Wow,” Andrew says, eyes on the phone. “He has no idea.”
The driver turns up the air, grumbling, and she points the vent directly at her face and looks out the window again. She unfocuses her eyes and begins to count silently and slowly. At twenty, she feels good enough to say to Andrew, “Get it ready and show it to me fast.”
“Okay, okay,” Andrew says in the aggrieved tone of someone who’s been interrupted, and Miaow thinks, This is how he talks to his mother.
“Here we go,” he says, holding up the phone.
“Down, down, I don’t want to see things moving behind it.”
“This is the guy,” Andrew says. The phone is on his left thigh, the thigh closer to Miaow. She leans forward, turns the vent toward her face’s new location, and looks down.
It’s a man in his hard-used forties, thick-waisted and frog-faced, with rough, damaged skin and a bunched, unpleasant mouth, the mouth of someone who doesn’t hear “no” much. On a sidewalk somewhere in Bangkok. Three-quarter face, not looking at the camera. Wide shoulders and a small paunch. Black oily hair, combed straight back from a low hairline, a triangular face that narrows toward the top, with the base formed by a broad frog’s jaw that’s slowly sinking into fat. The kind of guy, Miaow thinks, she’d cross the street to avoid.
“Here’s another one,” Andrew says, swiping the screen. “And another. Tell me what you think.”
There are seven pictures of the man. They’re taken from different angles, the man never looking toward the camera. Miaow knows what Andrew means by creepy: the man had no idea he was being photographed.
“This is kind of icky,” Andrew says.
“It’s sneaky.” She has a furtive feeling, not entirely unpleasant, as though she’s spying: it feels grimy but a little bit thrilling, too. And then there’s the man himself. He’s what some of her school’s popular girls would describe as nothing to skip lunch for. He looks as if he might be bad to bump into, as though he’s made of something heavier than whatever goes into most people. Brutal is the word that comes to mind.
“Look at these,” Andrew says, pointing the tip of his little finger at the man’s head. Gleaming in his left ear are three heavy looped earrings.
“He’s too old to wear those,” Miaow says. “He’s older than Poke.”
Andrew says, “I’ve seen him before, I think. Somewhere.”
“I haven’t seen him,” Miaow says. “And I don’t want to. He’s scary.”
Andrew nods just as Miaow looks up, on the verge of getting sick, and sees that the driver is pulling to the curb. She puts a hand on the door handle.
“Wait,” Andrew says. His hand lands on her arm. “You’ve got to look again. You haven’t seen the fat one yet.”
8
You Can’t Live for the Dead
ARTHIT HAS BEEN trying for half an hour to smile through the abdominal cramps that announce that he’s once again followed his head without consulting his heart. The cramps already feel like snarls of the purest anxiety, but when he opens the door to the small closet, they take a leap in intensity that almost folds him in half.
He hasn’t cleaned it out. He remembers now, cataclysmically, that he postponed it out of cowardice. He’d managed to get rid of her shoes and her fancy things—not that her family had let her take many of them when she left to marry him—but he’d told himself not to rush things when it came to her everyday clothes, the clothes he could have recognized a block away on a crowded sidewalk. The clothes that would have made him smile on sight.
So they’re still hanging here.
And they smell of her.
She might as well be standing in the closet, looking at him. Noi. His dead wife, the woman who had been the center of his being for almost fifteen years.
“This is the last one,” Anna Chaibancha says, tugging a black, many-zippered suitcase through the door. Her face is shiny with sweat; Arthit has a lower-back spasm to go with his cramps, and Anna insisted on toting her things into the house. All morning Arthit has been holding a silent negotiation with Noi’s ghost as he distributes Anna’s things here and there, trying to find places where they’ll look natural, where they won’t spring at him every time he comes into a room. Is it all right if I move this? he asks the air as he places on the living-room table a photo of the son whom Anna’s rich former husband rarely permits her to see. With a quick apology he slips into the table’s single drawer the picture of him and Noi, beaming into the sunlight beside the climbing rose she’d planted. “You never liked this vase,” he whispers as he replaces it with a plastic trophy from Anna’s son’s school, almost the only token she seems to have of his present life.
Finding places for the cooking implements Anna loves, pushing aside Noi’s old spatula, Noi’s old rolling pin, Noi’s favorite carving knife, Japanese and rusting now because Noi didn’t believe stainless steel took an edge. Anna had looked at it and wrinkled her nose, but Arthit said, “It gets sharper than you can believe.” Her glance had been as sharp as the knife.
But he’s gotten through it by telling himself, It’s not Anna’s fault, it’s not anybody’s fault. You can’t live for the dead. Over an hour or two, the argument has condensed itself into the single sentence You can’t live for the dead. Noi wouldn’t have wanted him to live for the dead. The phrase has taken on the properties of a spell, a talisman against the dull edge of sorrow that keeps sawing away at him.
But it’s not powerful enough for this. Not for these clothes that she once filled with her body, that she had bought and modeled for him, looking for his approval and laughing when he couldn’t simulate it. The clothes he’d seen each morning, the clothes she’d been wearing when he came home. The scent that welcomed him back.
He can’t let Anna see the clothes. It would put her in an impossibly awkward position.
She’s hauled the suitcase to the top of the bed and stands with her back to him, unzipping it. Her head is down, baring the pale neck beneath her efficiently blunt-cut hair, so thick, so different from Noi’s flyaway hair with the curl she kept trying to comb out of it. It amazes Arthit that Anna hasn’t felt something of his … his panic or desperation or whatever it is that’s threatening to bring him to his knees in his own bedroom.
He pushes the closet door closed, grateful for once that she can’t hear it, and crosses the room. As he’s about to touch her arm she senses him and turns to him with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and he realizes she has sensed something, and all he can think to do is open his arms.
The smile goes the rest of the way home, and she embraces him, actually rocking him back and forth. She’s short but solid, much stronger physically than Noi had—
Stop that. You can’t live for the dead.
She steps back and looks at him more closely. Her eyebrows contract, and she reaches up and brushes the pad of her thumb over the skin below his right eye. He blinks quickly, several times, fighting a surprising surge of irritation, and nods. “Yes,” he says. “I’m tired.”
She lets her hands drop and busies herself smoothing the thighs of her linen pants, wrinkled with the heat. She says, in the atonal voice of those who have been deaf since birth, “What can I do?”
“Coffee,” he says, feeling fraudulent to the soles of his shoes. “A cup of coffee. Would you like one, too?”
She nods, lowering her eyes, and turns to leave the room, but he touches her arm. “The good coffee,” he says when she’s looking at him. “Grind the beans. Is that all right?”
“If you want,” she says.
“It would be better,” he says.
Anna hesitates, as though waiting for more, and then turns away. Arthit watches her as she turns right in the hallway to the kitchen. The moment she’s out of sight he grabs the partially open suitcase and puts it on the floor and yanks the bedspread and blankets all the way to the foot of the bed. Within a few seconds he’s pulled the top sheet off, dropped it onto the floor, and put the covers and bedspread back on. He t
akes an extra moment to straighten the pillows and chase some wrinkles to the edge of the mattress with his palms. Forgetting his back, he bends to pick up the suitcase. When he lifts it, it feels like pliers closing on the base of his spine, and he can’t stand completely upright.
He drops the bag on the bed and uses his foot to kick the sheet on the floor open until it’s almost full-size. Then he stands there, leaning forward with his hands on his thighs, panting, feeling like he’s going to burst into tears. He bends his knees more sharply, trying to stretch through the pull in his lower back, wrenches himself upright, and yanks open the closet door.
Her scent billows out at him, a kind of pale lavender shimmer with a hint of the talcum she used to dust herself with in the hottest months. He spreads his arms wide and pulls the clothes together into a bundle, but instead of removing them, he stands there with his arms wrapped around them, almost hanging on them, swaying back and forth and breathing deeply through the cloth. With a grunt he lifts it all, until the hooks on the clothes hangers clear the horizontal rod they’re hanging from, and he swivels to pull them, sideways, through the door so he can drop them onto the open sheet.
It takes one more fragrant armload to empty the closet. Once the clothes are gone, he goes on tiptoe, not even feeling the pain in his back now, and sweeps his palm across the high shelf to make sure there’s nothing there, and when his hand comes down he’s holding a tiny white purse, covered in something that sparkles, a purse he hasn’t seen since the day they were married.
He can’t keep himself from opening it. The scent swims out at him even before he sees the pressed tuberose, a clipping from her bouquet.
And he’s lost, standing there open-mouthed and loose-limbed, completely adrift in the moment, with the weightless, brittle, faded flower in his palm.
The coffee grinder whirs into life in the kitchen.
He eases the flower into the purse and pats it goodbye, then places the purse in the center of the bright sundress on top of the pile. With an old man’s grunt, he drops to one knee and lifts the bottom edge of the pile of clothes and folds them in half, and then he wraps the sheet around them neatly, like an enormous cloth envelope. He compresses it with his hands until it will fit beneath the bed, and then shoves it out of sight. With his hands flat on the floor and his cheek against the side of the mattress, he lets himself breath deeply four or five times, repeating to himself, You can’t live for the dead. And then pushes through the spasm in his back and stands upright, and there it is in front of him: the whole room and everything in it, from the color on the walls to the pattern on the pillowcases: it’s all Noi.
He puts his face in his hands and says her name three times aloud, a supplication of sorts, a plea to the only person who always helped him. Then, making a mental list of the things in the room he’ll have to replace, he turns to the business of the living.
Most of Anna’s clothes are hanging neatly when she comes into the bedroom with two cups of coffee in her hands. She hands him one and raises her own cup until he lifts his and toasts her, and then she looks at the closet and goes to it, running her hand over the hanging clothes.
“You are the sweetest man,” she says. When they first met she’d been reluctant to speak aloud, insecure about her voice, but now she almost never uses the pale blue pad she’d written everything on during those first days. She gives him a smile that ties his heart in a knot and takes a deep breath. “It smells so good in here.”
At the precise moment his words desert him, Arthit’s cell phone rings. He smiles at her and puts it to his ear. His lieutenant, Kosit, says, “You’d better get in here. Last night someone killed Sawat and three other guys.”
“It was just a matter of time,” Arthit says, feeling Anna’s eyes on his lips.
“Well, your boss is completely crazy, and two of the three who were killed were cops.”
9
Flat as Buttons
THE ROOMS THROUGH which Arthit hauls himself, his back still in spasm and arguing against every step he takes, are oddly quiet. Here and there, cops gather in tight circles. Faces are stiff and voices are low. One of Arthit’s friends meets his eyes, points up toward the floor claimed by the brass, fills his cheeks with air and blows it out, and shakes his head.
Meaning, rampage.
Well, fuck him, Arthit thinks. By “him,” Arthit means his immediate superior, Thanom, a man who has painstakingly squandered every bit of trust any of his subordinates were ever misguided enough to offer him. He’s a fifth-rate cop but an Olympic medalist at riding the ever-shifting updrafts and occasional tailwinds of political favor. Kosit, Arthit’s closest friend on the force, once said, “He’s never missed an ass he tried to kiss.” Thanom has survived the rise and fall of prime ministers and police chiefs. He’s weathered the intricate, Machiavellian backstage minuets of the princelings—the third and fourth sons of old families, assigned to stratospheric ranks in the police because their older brothers have already claimed positions in government and the military. Once embedded, the princelings seize territory, inhale departments, and double-cross each other in the perpetual struggle to dip into the wide, endless river of graft.
Thanom should be upset about this, Arthit thinks. He should be scared bloodless.
Kosit materializes out of a doorway. He says, “You look a hundred.”
Arthit says, “Thank you for reminding me.”
Kosit slows to Arthit’s pace. They walk side by side, eyes straight ahead, trying not to look like they’re having a conversation.
“He wants to keep it in this department,” Kosit says, barely moving his lips. He waves at someone as they pass a door.
“Sure, he does. He’s got to be soaking wet and stinking by now. This will splash all over him.”
“The Dancer? He’ll shimmy out of the way. He did before, didn’t he?”
“Just barely,” Arthit says. “Sawat reported to him. It was a miracle he didn’t go down when the story broke.”
“You mean, just because one of his very own, hand-chosen, hand-promoted officers was running a murder-for-hire ring, using other cops to kill people? Little thing like that’s not going to bring down the Dancer. Barely scratched his finish.”
They make a right and go up a flight of stairs, Arthit feeling the cramps in his stomach having a tug-of-war with the ones in his back. “Who were the cops who got killed?”
“Didn’t recognize the names of the active cops, but the other guy got kicked out same time Sawat did. Worked under Thanom, too. A real low-forehead, first name was Jian.”
“Don’t remember.”
“A head-cracker.”
“Good company for Sawat.” They reach the top of the stairs. “You know,” Arthit says, “if you think back to high school, a lot of the people who became cops were tough guys. You looked at them then and you thought, fifty-fifty which side they’d wind up on. Could have been kicking heads in for some godfather or carrying a gun and a stick and kicking heads for mom and country.”
“That was me,” Kosit says, his leathery face wrinkling in a grin.
“What brought you to the side of the angels?”
“The cops usually won,” Kosit says as Arthit goes through the door with a grunt as his back muscles find a new way to squeeze. “And then, of course, there was the shining example of men like you.”
Arthit laughs, but his laughter stops when he walks into the low-walled cubicle occupied by the dragon who heads the group’s secretarial pool, and receives a look that’s simultaneously frayed and rattled. Arthit can’t remember the dragon ever being rattled.
“He wants you,” she says the moment she spots him.
“He’ll wait.”
She shakes her head, picks up a phone and punches a double-digit number. “He just walked in,” she says. “He’ll be right up.”
Arthit says, “Traitor.”
“This is no time to demonstrate how independent you are. I’ve been here forty years, and it’s never been like this.” To
Kosit, she says, “Drag him up there.”
Kosit says, “Come on,” and snags Arthit’s arm, pulling him around toward the door and wrenching a groan from Arthit as his back clenches like a fist. “Be a big boy,” Kosit says, hauling his friend along, “and later you can have some ice cream.”
“WAIT,” SAYS THANOM’S secretary as Arthit comes in. Kosit had peeled off at the last moment like a booster rocket, his work done.
“He wants me.”
“He wants everything,” she says. “But most of all he doesn’t want anyone going through that door until he says it’s all right.”
Arthit lifts both hands and lets them fall, just an acknowledgment that neither of them is in charge of anything.
She punches a button and says, “The Lieutenant-Colonel is here.” She winces at the response and replaces the phone very gently. “Go right in. You might want to straighten up a little.”
“If only I could,” Arthit says. He goes to the door, grabs a breath, and pushes it open.
“Why aren’t you in uniform?” Thanom demands. He’s behind his desk, his face as impassive as always, the black eyes flat as buttons, the long upper lip with its suggestion of chimpanzee as rigid as ever. Offhand, Arthit can’t remember ever seeing his superior’s upper teeth.
There are dark rings under his arms and damp handprints all over the glass on top of his desk. Thanom is no one’s idea of an expressive man, but he actually smells of anxiety, strongly enough to cut through the sneeze-provoking scent of the air freshener plugged into the wall outlet behind him.
“I’m off today,” Arthit says.
Thanom blinks. “Is that right? Thanks for coming in.”
This is new territory. Thanom has never thanked him before. Arthit says, “My pleasure,” hoping it sounds more sincere than it feels.
The full colonel’s three stars glitter on Thanom’s uniform. He uses his cuff to blot his upper lip. “We’ve got a situation.”
“Sawat.”
Thanom looks up quickly. “Is the news out?”
For the Dead Page 6