For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  On her right, another opening, just wider than her shoulders, separates two booths.

  The group of Arabs continues to clog the traffic. When Miaow slants right, she’ll be in plain sight for a moment. She cuts in front of a skinny, jittery-looking farang and slips into the dark space between the booths, meaning to scoot straight through it to the curb and hurry back on the traffic side to put herself behind whoever is back there.

  But she can’t. There’s a web of black electrical wires, eight or nine of them, hanging parallel to one another like a fence, connecting a line of booths to a single bootlegged outlet. If she snags them as she tries to get through, lights will blink off on either side, and her follower will be right on her heels.

  Her heart pushes her like a drumbeat as she turns around and threads her way back into the crowd, hoping not to shove up against whoever it is.

  Coming up on the left is Soi 7/1, now essentially a one-block red-light district. A Coffee World on the corner lends it a patina of respectability that vanishes the moment the rest of the street, lurid with pink neon and girls in short skirts, comes into view. The sidewalk in front of her is a dense press of people, but the soi will give her room to run. She goes into the Coffee World, angles through it quickly, and comes out the side entrance, directly onto the soi, which looks like a dead end but actually ends in a U to the right, an unpaved, usually muddy passageway that leads back to Sukhumvit. She takes one look behind her and breaks into a run.

  I’m not as fast as I used to be, she thinks. Still, she outran the darker of the men who chased her and Andrew, and that thought gives her an extra burst of speed. Just as she thinks she’ll be all right, she hears running feet behind her.

  Instead of looking over her shoulder, which on this uneven street could put her flat on her face, she pushes herself to her top speed, hearing the slap of shoes and then a disorganized crumple of noise and a shout, and she slows just enough to glance back and see a farang sitting in the road yelling at the man who’s just knocked him down—the man who had blocked her and Andrew’s path to the boulevard when they were being chased from the Sikh’s booth. The man who was knocked down is young, strong, and angry enough to be slightly drunk, and Miaow sees him as a weapon and angles right, all the way to the curb, and then turns left and left again, making a fast U-turn that puts her running at full speed back the way she came. She pushes her way through a startled covey of miniskirted girls who are trying to wave customers into a massage parlor.

  Her pursuer slows and stumbles, his mouth wide and his eyes blinking in uncertainty. Recovering his balance, he tries to edge left fast enough to intercept Miaow as she emerges from the group of masseuses. She sees the silver glint of a knife and she screams the highest, shrillest sound she can force out, just squeezing past the man with the knife and grabbing onto the one who had been knocked down, wrapping her arms around his waist and shrieking for help.

  The farang shakes her loose as Miaow’s pursuer slows and then stops, and then the farang makes a leap toward him, calling him motherfucker, and the dark-haired man takes a single swipe with the knife as girls on both sides of the soi back up onto the sidewalk, clucking like chickens, and then he turns and runs away, toward the bottom of the U, and within two or three seconds, Miaow is back on the Sukhumvit sidewalk, edging between booths and flagging a motorcycle taxi.

  The moment she’s onboard, the driver peels into traffic and shouts, “Where?”

  Miaow says, “Anywhere.” Changing her mind, she leans forward and says, “Klong Toey near the river.”

  26

  Her Mother Was Beautiful

  “SHE’S NOT ANSWERING,” Rose says. “Her phone must be off.”

  Rafferty says, “Or something has—”

  The doorbell rings, and Arthit gets up. When he comes back in, he’s ushering a slender young man in a yellow linen shirt. Rose, who stood the moment the bell rang, runs to him and takes both of the young man’s shoulders to look at him. “You’re so handsome,” she says. “How are Da and the baby?”

  Boo ducks his head, embarrassed by the praise but grinning. “They’re fine,” he says. “Baby is—” He holds his hands two feet apart and spreads them wider, then does it again. “Too big,” he says. Rose finally gives Poke a turn with him, and a piece of paper in Boo’s hand crackles as the two of them hug. Poke steps back, looking down at the page. Boo turns it around to display a pencil sketch of a young girl, and Poke has the sense that his entire world is drawing in around him, past and present, and from all directions, all at once.

  He takes the drawing and shows it to Rose and says, “Treasure.”

  THE LITTLE GIRL is pretty in an angular, mischievous, fox-faced way, and the little boy would be handsome if it weren’t for his protruding front teeth. They’re both sidewalk-thin and dumbstruck by the array of adults facing them. Rose has gone home so she’ll be there if Miaow shows up, but Arthit and Anna occupy the chairs in front of Boo’s desk, with Boo behind it and Rafferty sitting on one of its corners. In addition to Dok and Chalee, three other kids have drifted into the room, so Boo enlarged the office by pushing back two of the partitions. With a quick glance at Anna, he’d also erased a mildly pornographic cartoon someone had drawn on his white board.

  “She was sick,” Chalee says defiantly. “We wanted to help her.”

  “We know you were helping, Chalee,” Boo says.

  “It was my fault we were out on the street when we found her,” the boy says.

  “It’s good that you did,” Rafferty says. He holds up the drawing. “Which one of you made this?”

  “I did,” Chalee says.

  Rafferty says, “You have talent. I recognized her instantly.”

  “She’s in a hospital bed,” Boo says. “She’s been handcuffed and sedated because—”

  “I can imagine,” Rafferty says.

  To Rafferty’s surprise, Anna lifts her free hand; she’s writing with the other. Then she holds the card up to Boo: Is she a danger to herself? To others?

  “We don’t know,” Boo says as the children stare at Anna. “What do you think?” he asks Poke. “You’re the only one who knew her before.”

  “I didn’t know her,” Poke says. He blinks away the recurring vision of the burning house. “I met her once, when I sneaked into her house. She was—she is—damaged. Her father, he—he hit her a lot. He tried to make her into someone like him.”

  “Like him?” Boo says.

  “He was a violent man.” He looks up at all the eyes fixed on him. “I don’t know how she’ll feel when she sees me. I helped to kill him.”

  “You killed him?” Dok says.

  Poke jams his hands into his pockets, trying to decide how to approach it. He decides on details. “About eight weeks ago, as I said, I was inside her house. Here, in Bangkok. There was an explosion. He was killed. I thought she’d been killed, too, but I was wrong. I don’t think she’s ever been outside the walls of that house before.” He turns to Anna. “So, actually, I don’t know whether she’s dangerous.”

  Dok says, “She lets me sleep on her bed.”

  Poke says, “You two are probably the first friends she’s ever had.”

  Anna holds up a hand again as she writes. The card says, She’s socializing. That’s a good sign.

  “But I don’t know what she’ll do when she sees me,” Poke says.

  “You’re the one she asked for,” Chalee says.

  “I’m surprised at that, too,” Rafferty says. “But as—as odd as it sounds, there were a few minutes there when we almost made friends. I listened to her. I don’t think anyone had listened to her much. When she got nervous about me getting too close, I made a game out of it. I mimed a big plate glass window between us, and then I pretended to walk into it and bump my head.” He rubs his forehead and looks up to find everyone in the room staring at him, although no one is staring with more intensity than Anna. “I played with her,” he says. “It made her laugh.”

  Chalee says, “Did she talk?
”

  “Sure. She asked me about my daughter.” Poke stops at the thought of Miaow, still out there somewhere, then pushes forward. “She wanted to know whether—” He swallows. “Whether I liked her. I mean, if the question is, can she talk, the answer is yes.”

  Boo says, “How did she respond to her father’s death?”

  “When he got shot—” He feels the children’s eyes on him and sees that their mouths are hanging open. “Jesus, what a conversation. When he got shot, what she said was, ‘Do it again.’ ”

  The room falls into silence, no one really looking at anyone else. Dok is the one who breaks it. He says, “I know lots of kids who would say that.”

  EVERYONE BUT POKE stops at the door. Dok is ready to trot in, but Chalee yanks his arm, practically pulling him off his feet, and Poke goes in alone, the key to the handcuffs in his palm.

  A few steps in, he stops to take in the small, dim room, the two metal chairs, the narrow bed with its fever-creased sheets, the gleaming IV stand. From the far end of the bed, her gaze hits him like a stream of cold air.

  He goes only halfway to her. “Hello, Treasure.”

  She looks at her lap.

  “I’m so happy to see you.” It feels trite, but it’s what he means. “I’ve been worrying about you.” He’s speaking English, her father’s language, as he had when he first met her. She hasn’t looked back up at him, and he takes a couple of slow, careful steps closer. “I went back the next day,” he says. “The day after everything happened. Into your room, in the hedge.” She remains still. “Looking for you.”

  He tries not to hover over her, tries to let the silence lengthen until she decides to break it. He fails. Says, “I’m here. You asked Dok and Chalee for me, and I’m here.”

  Silence stretches emptily between them. To Rafferty, who can feel his heartbeat’s muffled thump against the skin on the inside of his wrists, the silence almost has a weight to it. As he’s about to speak again, she says hoarsely, “Dok.”

  “Your friend,” he says. “Dok. And—and Chalee. Treasure. Can I come close enough to take those handcuffs off?”

  She tugs against the right cuff and says, “I can’t fight.”

  “You don’t need to,” he says. “All you have to do is say no. Do you want to say no?”

  She turns her face away.

  “They only put them on you because you were so sick and they were afraid you’d run away. Do you want me to take them off?”

  She says, “Look.” She sits forward, just far enough to spit on the back of her left wrist. A moment later, she holds up her hand, leaving the cuff dangling from the rail. She turns to look at her hand, and her eyes meet his for an instant and dart away again.

  “You could have gone,” he says. “Any time.”

  Now she brings her eyes to his and holds his gaze. She says, “Where?”

  The word hits him like a slap. How could he not have seen it coming? He says, automatically, “You’re going to be fine.”

  Her hands are clenched so tightly that her knuckles are white. Two knuckles on the hand she tugged free of the cuff are bleeding. She breathes deeply and says, “My—my—my—”

  “He’s dead,” Rafferty says. “You know that.”

  “And my mo—my—Neeni, Neeni.”

  “She’s—Neeni. You know how she was, and she’s still like that. Let me unlock the other one, you’ve hurt your hand.” Holding his breath, he moves to the side of the bed and very slowly bends over her arm. Not touching her skin, he angles the cuff upward until he can work the key into it and turns the key until he hears the double click and it springs open. “There,” he says.

  She works her wrist back and forth, wincing slightly, and then holds up the arm with the IV in it, extended and palm up, the pale elbow open to him “This,” she says.

  “I can’t take that out,” he says. “I’ll—I’ll faint. Needles make me—” He makes a little cyclone spiral with his hand.

  “That’s silly,” she says, and she begins to peel off the bandage.

  “No, no, wait. Wait, wait, wait.” He turns to the doorway. “She’s going to pull out the drip,” he says, hearing the panic in his voice, and then he hears something that sounds like a hiccup, and then another hiccup, and he turns back to the bed.

  She’s laughing. She’s laughing at him. She’s beautiful.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, the drip has been pulled while Rafferty has his back turned. Dok has claimed his place on the bed, sliding the empty handcuff up and down the left-hand rail, making a skin-tightening sound until Chalee, sitting on one of the metal chairs at the bedside, slaps his hand.

  The sound of the slap brings Treasure’s head around, fast, but when she sees Dok shaking his hand in the air, her face relaxes. She looks down at Dok as though he’s something new and unexpected, something that sprouted up through the blankets and into the light.

  Chalee says to Poke, “She’s so pretty.”

  “Her mother was beautiful,” Rafferty says as Treasure’s eyes come to him. He’s on the metal chair Dok vacated when he climbed onto the bed. Treasure didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him; her hand was only an inch or two from the edge of the bed, and when he sat down she hadn’t pulled it away. He feels its presence as though it’s throwing off heat, knowing it’s costing her something to leave it there. Slowly, he puts his hand beside hers, and she doesn’t move away. “She’s still beautiful,” he says.

  Treasure lets the remark float past her as though it were in a language she doesn’t understand but then, very slightly, her chin dimples. She puts a hand to her face as if she could still it that way.

  Boo and Arthit had seemed to make Treasure nervous, so Rafferty and Dok are the only males in the room. Chalee is drawing again, a picture of a young girl sitting in a dim room, the light coming from a window to the girl’s left. She works with little attention to the task, as though the lines are already faintly sketched on the paper. Leaning against the wall at the end of the bed, her arms crossed across her chest, Anna regards the group at the bed with, it seems to Rafferty, the kind of dampened regret she might feel toward a picture that’s emerged inaccurately from memory. The peculiar focus Rafferty felt from her when he described his first encounter with Treasure has lessened but not disappeared, and Rafferty knows she’s watching the lips of everyone who is facing her.

  “Who is that, Chalee?” he asks.

  She keeps drawing for a long moment, and when she looks up, it’s not at Rafferty but at Treasure. “My sister,” she says. “Sumalee.”

  “How old is she?”

  Breaking her gaze on Treasure, Chalee begins erasing fiercely. “She’s dead.”

  Treasure’s eyes remain on her, and Chalee raises her head again. To Treasure, she says, “She killed herself.”

  Treasure says, “Your—your father?”

  “No. Well, yes, but no.” Chalee glances at Rafferty, just an instant, as though she would rather he weren’t in the room. In a mixture of Thai and Lao, she says to Treasure, “We were—rice farmers, in Isaan. We didn’t have money. He, my father, borrowed a little every year from a bank—no, no, not a bank,” she says, squinting toward the memory, “a trust. Farmer’s Trust, something like that. And he trusted them, like their name said, but then they took the farm and the house. My father was going to sell Sumalee to get the money, but she ran to our old house and threw a rope over the beam in front of the window.” She and Treasure look at each other as though no one else is there. “She told me she was going to leave a present for the Trust,” Chalee says. “I didn’t know what she meant.”

  Treasure pulls her feet up and pats the covers on the bed, and Chalee puts down the stack of paper and crawls up as Dok slides over to make room. There’s a moment of silence, and then Chalee starts to cry. A second later, Dok sniffles.

  Anna stands suddenly and waves Poke out of the room. As he goes through the door, his phone rings: Rose.

  “Now I am worried,” she says. “I called Nguyen, and Andrew
is there, but they haven’t seen her. I searched her room, hoping she’d left her phone, but it’s not there. Poke, I’m getting frightened.”

  He tries to think of something worth saying and can’t. “She’ll be fine. I’m sure she will.”

  “But why hasn’t she called? Why hasn’t she answered?”

  “She’s hurt. She thinks we lied to her.”

  Rose says, “That’s probably it.” There’s a moment’s silence, and she disconnects.

  “Sure,” Rafferty says to the dead phone. He turns, not certain whether to leave or go back into Treasure’s room, but Anna makes a noise like steam, Sssss-sssss-sssss, a demand for his attention.

  She’s writing on one of her blue cards. Impatiently, she pulls it free and hands it to him and begins to write on the next one.

  The fluorescents in the hallway are dim and far apart. Angling the card to catch as much light as possible, he reads,

  If you tell that child everything will be all right

  Anna is writing even more quickly than usual, and by the time he looks back at her, she’s already pulling out the second card and extending it. He can read it while it is still in her hand. It says: you had better be sure you’re telling her the truth.

  27

  Some Sort of Long-term Solution

  HE’S SO WEARY that he feels scooped out. He should go home, but what can he do there? Fuss at Rose? He knows from long experience that when she’s frightened she moves inward, becomes remote and distant, as though she’s wrapped in a brittle, transparent shell.

  It seems better to stay here. And maybe here, at least, something can to be settled.