“I can’t do that,” the almost-nurse says. She’s only about nineteen, and she looks very uncertain. “The needle has to be sterile.”
“Look at her,” Dok says, tugging the sleeve of his T-shirt all the way to his shoulder. “She’s so frightened. You won’t even get the needle into her arm.”
“But I can’t—”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Dok says very fast. He licks his lips and glances at the girl on the bed for a second. “Then do this. Take the needle out and aim it at my mouth and squirt some into my mouth.” To the girl he says, in one of the English phrases all Thais know, “No problem, look, look.”
“I don’t know,” the almost-nurse says.
“Well, I do,” Dok says. He opens his mouth wide, the two big teeth in front gleaming, and closes his eyes.
“Look at her,” Chalee says, and the almost-nurse takes a quick, timid look at the girl on the bed, who is watching the almost-nurse’s hands very closely. “She wants to see.”
“You don’t tell anybody,” the almost-nurse says. She slips the needle out of its sheath, positions it about six inches from Dok’s mouth, and squeezes the bag. A thin stream of clear fluid snakes into Dok’s mouth, and his eyes pop open, very wide, and a look of dismay seizes possession of his face for a second, but he banishes it and makes a great show of swallowing, and then, with another quick look at the girl on the bed, he opens his mouth again. This time, he lets the stream flow for a few seconds and then raises a hand. When the almost-nurse pulls the needle back, he turns to the girl on the bed, swallows hugely, makes a painful smile, and nods. The moment he looks at her, her eyes dart away.
“Good,” he says, and then he shudders.
Chalee says to the almost-nurse, “Does it have that sleeping stuff in it?”
“I don’t know,” the almost-nurse says, sounding surprised. “The doctor left three of them last night. All I do is put them in.”
Dok displays his arm to the girl on the bed, tapping his finger on the inside of his own elbow and then pointing at hers. “Okay?”
The girl closes her eyes and moans, but she lets her right hand fall open. She bares her gray teeth when the almost-nurse pulls off the bandage, and she turns her head to the left, toward Dok, when the needle goes in. But she doesn’t resist.
“Thanks,” the almost-nurse says to Dok, once the bag is dangling from its spindly metal stand. “I don’t know how I would have done it. Boo should know how much you helped.”
“She’s just frightened,” Chalee says. Dok pats the bottom of the bed, and when the girl’s eyebrows contract he points at his chest and then the bed. She doesn’t respond, so he slowly climbs back up onto the bed and begins to smooth her left hand again. Chalee pulls her chair up to the right side of the bed and when the girl turns to regard her, Chalee holds up her sketch and widens her eyes in a silent question.
But the girl doesn’t look at the drawing. Instead, she studies Chalee’s eyes for a moment and turns slowly back to Dok, up on one elbow on the bed beside her, his hand on hers. Chalee watches the two of them for a few minutes, and then Dok’s eyes grow heavy and close, and he puts his head down on the bed. The girl looks down at him, so emptily he might be a mile away, and then she begins to blink slowly, and her eyelids come up a little less with each blink and then close again.
Except for one short, rubbery snore from Dok, the room is completely silent. Chalee gives them a few minutes to slide more deeply into sleep, then gets up and tows her chair to the other side of the bed, where she can see both of them. With their eyes closed and their lips parted they look like they’ve gone somewhere together. She begins to draw.
11
Human Fractals
THE MONEY IS driving him crazy.
Rafferty has never thought much about money, aside from wishing for more of it. Now that he has more than he knows what to do with, he thinks about it all the time.
When he’s not thinking about that girl running into the burning house, that is. Or when he’s not thinking about Miaow.
He doesn’t know which event comes as more of a surprise: that he’s suddenly swimming in money—money that he can’t, in good conscience, spend—or that Miaow has become so paralyzingly difficult.
He’s long been aware, as a matter of information, that children go insane when they become teenagers. But it’s one thing to know that and to sympathize politely with people whose kids have suddenly ceased to be conventional, predictable beings and turned into human fractals. It’s another to deal with it day by day in your own home, when the child who’s bewildering you is the one you love. And Rafferty loves Miaow with a love that seems to flow through him rather than from him, because, he thinks, he couldn’t possibly hold so much. He’d have run dry years ago.
His laptop screen goes dark, a reproach for how long it’s been since he touched the keys. Not that he has anything to write, anyway. He’s making a second try at fiction, and the people he makes up seem much less interesting than the people he knows. The coffee in the kitchen, his nose tells him, is burned. When Rose drifted in there half an hour ago, on her way out of the apartment, he’d asked her to turn off the pot and she’d said she would, but what he’s smelling right now is fried coffee. He gets up from the white hassock, now stuffed, like practically everything else in the apartment, with Haskell Murphy’s money, and goes into the kitchen. The little red light glows reproachfully on the coffeemaker and the stink is so thick the air should be brown. He snaps the hotplate off and totes the carafe to the sink, where he runs cold water into it. The pot makes a loud high clicking sound like teeth slamming together, but when he pours out the water, it’s intact.
“If I were broke,” he says to it, “you’d have split in two.”
After Miaow left, towing most of Rafferty’s heart behind her, Rose telephoned half a dozen of her confidantes from the bedroom, showered and dressed, and then gave him a distracted kiss on the head, forgot to turn off the coffeemaker, and left to meet one of the crew—probably Fon, her first friend in Bangkok, back when she was new to the bars.
Rafferty is halfway through filling the grinder with beans before he realizes he’s making coffee in a sort of automatic chain of actions that began when he rinsed the carafe. He glances at his watch: 2:30 P.M., and decides to finish the job. He’ll have time to stop jittering before Miaow comes home.
She’s wrapped herself in some invisible parent repellant. For the first four years they lived together, she told them everything, even if she told most of it to Rose, but now she gets upset whenever she hears a question mark. She lives with them like a spy in deep cover: she spends hours online but doesn’t talk about it. She goes to school but doesn’t talk about it. With a little cramp of anxiety, he acknowledges that he knows why: she’s told too many lies there, beginning with her first name. In the biography of Mia Rafferty she’s created, she was never a street child; Rose comes from a rich family somewhere up north; he, Poke, is a famous writer. Mia is practically an aristocrat.
And then, of course, there’s Andrew. Miaow talks to him and texts him endlessly and spends three or four afternoons at his parents’ apartment, but never talks about it. Asked what they do, she says, “Stuff.”
Rafferty supposes he should take some comfort from the fact that Andrew is so unthreatening, that he’s—well, a geek, a father-dominated Vietnamese geek with a big head on a narrow neck and no social skills at all. But Andrew will never be permitted to enter Poke’s Circle of Trust for the unarguable reason that he’s a boy, and Rafferty remembers, with eye-stinging clarity, what he had been like as a boy. At Andrew’s age, which is to say thirteen, Poke was already pushing his way into the deeper sexual thickets, with no regard at all for the girls who kindly showed him the way.
If Andrew ever treated Miaow the way he, Rafferty, had treated Sophie and Kim and Lita and—what was her name?—Trinity, and what had her parents been thinking?—if Andrew treated Miaow that way, Rafferty and Rose would be picking up pieces of her for years.
And he knows what Rose will advise. She’ll say, Leave her alone. And she’ll say it with such serene superiority that he’ll have to bite his tongue to keep from saying something really stupid.
He yanks the pot from beneath the steaming stream of coffee and slips his cup in. Somewhere in this irritable near-teen with her hacked, badly-colored hair is the little girl he met and befriended when she was selling gum all night in the entertainment district and whom he and Rose ultimately decided to adopt—the little girl who had never been in control of anything in her life. To whom every kindness they showed her was a gift. When Rafferty looks back, it’s easy for him to identify the time when she began this appalling metamorphosis: it was the day she stopped parting her hair. And now, here she is: impossible. It’s as though a butterfly had spun a cocoon and come out as a carnivorous caterpillar.
Three or four mouthfuls have dripped into the cup so he reverses the swap, slipping the pot back into position and wandering into the living room. The apartment’s space seems to him to be surprisingly elastic—small, even crowded when they’re all there, but large enough to echo when he’s alone in it. They’ve been amazingly happy here, he thinks, despite all the drama the rooms have hosted. One woman dead, another attacked with a knife, a destructive explosion of fury from a street child named Boo—the child who’d rescued Miaow when she was first abandoned on the sidewalk and given her a home and a band of friends, of sorts, before burning himself almost into invisibility in the fire of amphetamines.
And what is Boo up to now? he wonders. The kid’s been off drugs for a few years. Last time Rafferty saw him, he was working, a bit uneasily, with a pair of crooked cops in a scam to rip off tourists who tried to pick up children. Rafferty thinks the kid could probably succeed at anything he wants to do that doesn’t require formal education, but doubts he would stop working with homeless kids. Especially not now, with thousands of them flooding into Bangkok as Thailand’s rural farming communities break down.
He gulps the coffee and lets his eyes wander the room, seeing Murphy’s money everywhere: stacked beneath the cushions of the hassock, inside the couch, running all the way around the edge of the room beneath the carpet in stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Back in the old days, he’d felt flush if he had forty or fifty thousand baht stowed in the safe hidden in the headboard of his and Rose’s bed.
But, of course, this money isn’t really his. He doesn’t even know whether the person to whom it actually belongs is alive.
In all, the apartment has a little less than half a million dollars in it, jammed into every piece of furniture, in empty cereal boxes in the kitchen, in weighted baggies in the toilet tanks. He knows it’s silly to salt it everywhere like this—when he took it from a burning house eight weeks ago, it had fit very snugly into a single large briefcase—but he can’t bring himself to keep it all in one place. Given the number of unpleasant people who have come unbidden through their front door and the ease with which they’ve done it, it’s always possible there will be another, so why make it simple by putting all that money in one place? This way, at least the son of a bitch will have to work for it.
At times he wishes he could throw the money off the balcony. He can’t bank it because he can’t explain where he got it, and in Bangkok a large sum of money emits a fragrance that can penetrate the thick walls of banks, all the way to government and law-enforcement offices. The ones in uniform would give him a few memorably bad moments and take it all.
Here’s another reason he wishes he could just call Arthit. As a cop, Arthit probably knows how crooks hide the huge sums of illicit money the papers are always talking about. But he and Arthit—perhaps the best male friend he’s ever had—haven’t spoken comfortably since Arthit announced, in a brusque, awkward phone call, that Anna—Dr. Chaibancha—was going to move in with him.
Poke and Dr. Chaibancha have a wary non-relationship. She had been an acquaintance of Arthit’s now-dead wife, Noi, but when she knocked on his door to re-establish her friendship with Arthit, it was under false pretenses: she had actually been sent by Thai security police in the hope that she would learn, through Arthit, where Rafferty was and pass the information back to them. The cops had lied to her, appealed to her patriotism, but he still doesn’t trust her, and she knows it, and it can’t be paved over. The memory of her treachery, a little less than a couple of months ago, stands between him and Arthit like a wall.
The cup is empty. Rafferty shifts his weight from foot to foot in the middle of the living room, wishing he had work to do, wishing he knew how to talk to his daughter, wishing he could call his best friend, wishing he wasn’t burdened with all that money. Wishing he weren’t haunted by the image of a girl running into a burning house. Wondering how someone who has everything in the world that matters to him could be so deeply and so completely discontented.
12
Home
ARTHIT SAYS, “SAME man?”
Anna nods. She won’t speak aloud in public. They’re in the back corner of a restaurant just far enough from the station that it’s unlikely a familiar cop will wander in—and if one does it’ll confirm his belief that Thanom is going to keep an eye on him and Anna for a while, if only to know whether they met immediately after Anna looked at the surveillance videos. Arthit is certain he wasn’t followed from the station, so if anyone was, it’s Anna.
He looks around the restaurant again, sees no one who seems to be paying attention to them. He says, “Only one man.”
That I saw, she writes on one of the blue cards she carries.
“Kosit figures there were at least three. The security men in Sawat’s condo were killed with knives. Had to take two, at minimum. The man who shot Sawat and his guards was waiting upstairs in an unoccupied unit. So he thinks three. How do you know it was the same man on both tapes?”
He sips his iced coffee, keeping half an eye on the food cooling in the center of the table. She’s too busy writing to eat, and he feels a twinge of guilt and puts his hand over the pad. With his other hand, he indicates the food.
Anna pushes his hand away. He made his hair gray the second time and he walked like an old man, but when he moved fast, it was easy to see it was the same one.
“What kind of gun? In the second video, the killing of Thongchai.”
She shakes her head and shows him the palms of her hands.
“Not a big one, like the first time.”
Another shake of the head.
Arthit takes the pen and draws two crude guns, one a revolver with its curved lines, and the other a boxy automatic. Anna taps a fingernail on the automatic and holds up her index fingers, about seven or eight inches apart. She waits, and he nods.
“You could see what he said after he threw in the match?”
She scratches her head and then wiggles her hand from side to side, meaning, sort of. Then she begins to write again. I think he said, Two children. One woman.
“And when he killed the first men,” Arthit says. “He said, ‘Two women, three children.’ ”
She nods.
“Victims, probably,” Arthit says. “Sawat and Thongchai murdered a lot of people. These killings were probably revenge for the dead.” He rubs the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and says, “Children.”
Anna drops her gaze to the tablecloth. Without looking at the blue card, she folds it in half and then in half again. She uses her thumbnail to sharpen the creases and looks up as he taps the tablecloth.
“So first you looked at the video from last night, where he killed Sawat and the other three, and then som
eone brought in the second tape.”
Anna nods.
“And what happened to the cop who brought the tape into the room?”
She makes a brusque, shooing-away gesture, flapping the backs of her hands toward him.
“Thanom told him to leave. And Thanom’s reaction,” Arthit says. “When he saw the face on the second tape, the face of the fat man, how did he look?”
Anna unfolds the creased card and writes on the blank side, Like he went to the bathroom in his pants.
Arthit surveys the restaurant again and sees no one to worry about. He has a thousand things to worry about, but none of them seems to be present. He says, “Do you want to take the food home?”
She nods, gathering up the blue cards and stacking them, evening their edges so she can put them into the compartment in the front cover of the pad, where she keeps the ones she’s written on, and he motions to the waiter and makes a box in the air with his hands, miming shoveling the food into it. Anna breaks into laughter. She writes, Talking to me too much, and he joins her, although the laugh has to push its way past something squatting in the center of his chest.
The killing of Thongchai, Arthit thinks, will be very bad for Thanom. Thanom barely dodged the hail of institutional bullets when Sawat’s murder-for-hire scandal broke, and several innocent men went down in his place. Thongchai was Sawat’s lieutenant and accomplice. These killings will raise all the old questions again, and someone—finally—will have to take the blame. The question is, who.
For Arthit, one fact is inescapable. Thanom knows Anna will tell him about all this. The talk about respecting Arthit, about Arthit’s ethics, isn’t worth the breath Thanom used to pronounce the words. Ethics are the last thing Thanom’s interested in. So what’s he really up to?
For the Dead Page 8