For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Do you want me to talk to Mrs. Shin? About places you might go for lessons?”

  “Would you do that?” She’s closed the screen on her finger, and she pulls it out without looking down.

  “Will you try out for the play? For Small Town?”

  She says, “I already decided to.”

  “Then of course I’ll talk to Mrs. Shin. And you know, whatever your mother said to you last night when I wasn’t in the room, whatever she said about loving you? It goes for me, too.”

  “Oh, you,” Miaow says. “I’ve always known about you.”

  TEN FORTY-FIVE A.M., and it already feels like it should be dusk through the window.

  Thanom pushes the cup away so violently he almost upsets it. He’s been told to cut down on caffeine, and his secretary, Taan, has been given charge of the effort by his wife. The steaming cup contains chamomile tea, which tastes, he thinks, like steeped mummy fingers. And instead of giving him the lift he needs to cope with the present situation, it soothes him.

  He doesn’t need to be soothed. He needs an edge. He’s adrift on a fucking black ocean, without a light anywhere and rocks in all directions. He’s no closer than he was on Friday to finding the killers of Sawat and Thongchai, and though he’s almost certain that’s not really the issue, finding them would at least placate the princeling in the white uniform, who could break him in half any time he likes.

  He needs coffee.

  He’s thinking about seeing whether he can get someone to call Taan away from her desk so he can slip down the hall, fill a cup with the corrosive brew from the little kitchen, a brew that manages, even as it drips, to smell and taste half a day old, ancient and burned, with most of the water long evaporated. The way it should taste.

  Taan buzzes him.

  “Do you know someone named Arundee? Says he’s your banker.”

  “Arundee? No. Which bank?”

  “First Siam.”

  First Siam is one of the banks Thanom uses, but it’s mainly for his wife’s money, which is considerable. The idea that something might be wrong with one of his wife’s accounts brings him straight up in his chair. “Line two?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He punches the button. “Thanom.”

  “Yes, Colonel. Sorry to bother you—”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No, no, I wouldn’t say a problem. More an opportunity.”

  “Are you calling to sell me something?”

  “Not at all. It’s just that, well, there’s quite a bit of money in this account, and it seems to be inactive. I was wondering whether you’d thought about putting some or all of it into a CD with a better rate.”

  “You should be talking to my wife.”

  “Perhaps,” Arundee says cautiously, “but since it’s in your name, I thought—”

  “In my name,” Thanom says, and something heavy and formless begins to assemble itself in his gut. “With enough money to consider turning it into a CD.”

  “Oh, yes. Almost two million baht.”

  He has to inhale twice to get enough air to speak. “And there have been deposits until—when?”

  “Six months, more or less. The last one was five months and … twenty-six days ago.”

  “Almost two million.”

  “One million, nine-sixty. The rate on a CD that size would be—”

  “And the last withdrawal?”

  “Nine months, give or take.”

  “Wait, wait.” He passes his hand across his forehead and then wipes it on his shirt. “Why haven’t I been getting statements?”

  “They’ve been going out monthly.”

  “Monthly.”

  “Yes sir. Same as your wife’s accounts.”

  “But,” Thanom says, feeling for the bottom and not finding it. “But not to the same address.”

  “Oh,” Arundee says. “Let me look. That’s right, a different address.”

  “What address?”

  Arundee reads an address Thanom has never heard of.

  “What is that?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Thanom sits forward, hearing his wet shirt pull itself away from the back of his leather chair. “That address, what kind of address is that?”

  There’s a pause, and Thanom can almost feel Arundee sitting back in his chair. “Colonel, are you saying something is wrong?”

  “No, no. It’s just that—that there are a lot of accounts, and I don’t recognize the address.”

  “Most of our best customers have multiple accounts and multiple addresses,” Arundee says, sounding defensive. “Police officers, politicians, army commanders—”

  “I understand.” He covers the mouthpiece so the other man won’t hear him swallow. “The bank has always been very—very discreet. Just refresh my memory.”

  “It’s a post office box.”

  “Give me a moment here,” Thanom says. “Hang on.” He puts the receiver on the desk and uses his sleeve to mop his face. Then he draws three deep breaths, gets up, goes to the door, and opens it. “Coffee,” he says. “And no argument.”

  Back at the desk, he says, “We do have a problem. And it might be a police problem. I need you to answer some questions. Official questions.”

  “But—I’m not the right person for this.”

  “I don’t care. Answer the questions you can and make a list of the ones you can’t, and get back to me with answers. Clear? Unless you want officers in uniform down there, I don’t want excuses, I want answers. How much was the last deposit?”

  “Umm … twenty-two thousand baht.”

  “And the one before that?”

  “I have to bring that up.” Thanom hears keys clacking. “Twenty thousand.”

  “How long before?”

  “Six months. Before the last one, I mean, so that would be a little more than fifteen months ago.”

  “They’ve been every six months?”

  “Just … a … minute. Pretty, um, pretty close. And recently they’ve been between nineteen and twenty-two thousand baht each. Average is about twenty thousand baht.”

  He sees a small piece of blue sky. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. That would be something like a hundred deposits every six months. What’s that, fifty years? They would have started when I was nine years old.”

  “I said recently. They were quite a bit bigger seven or eight years back.”

  He can’t help himself: he echoes Arundee. “Seven or eight years.”

  “That’s an estimate.” He hears keys clicking. “But, yes, they got smaller a little less than six years ago. For the first two or three years, they were bigger.”

  “How much bigger?”

  “Considerably. They vary, but they were in the hundreds of thousands.”

  “Hundreds of—” The door opens, and Taan comes in, her mouth a graphic of disapproval. She puts down the half-full cup harder than necessary and makes a straight-line exit.

  “The biggest was a little more than two hundred thousand.”

  Thanom tries to blink away the little spots floating in front of his eyes, tries to slow his breathing. He sucks down half of the coffee and pushes the buzzer. “How were the deposits made?”

  “I can’t—I mean, I don’t have that information. This was just an exploratory call.”

  “Find out.” The door opens, and Thanom drains the cup and holds it out. “More. Now.”

  When Taan is gone, he says, “I need to know how the deposits were made and by whom. I need a list of dates and amounts. I need to know what branches they were made to. I need to know what identification your people demanded and what it said. And anything else you can think of that might be helpful to someone who’s just learned he has millions of baht in an account he never opened, and who’s a high-ranking police officer. And I don’t suppose I need to tell you this should be discreet.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ten minutes. I’ll wait ten minutes.”

  Thanom hangs up and exhales so
heavily it catches in his throat. He gets up and goes through the door to meet his coffee halfway.

  30

  Question Time

  RAFFERTY FEELS TIME at his back, like a wind. He has no idea what will happen next, but he knows that the trouble isn’t over, that it’s closing in from one side or the other, and he needs somehow to get out in front of it.

  So his first exchange, with Hwa, is a pleasant surprise, if only because it goes by so quickly. She had met him at the door of the apartment she keeps Neeni in and accepted the envelopes without a change in expression, as though people handed her sixty thousand dollars every day, and said she’d already taken care of the tickets.

  “Good, that’s good.” She starts to close the door, but he stops her. “Ummm, listen. I found Treasure.”

  Hwa says, “So?”

  “Maybe if she saw Treasure, maybe—”

  Hwa shakes her head. “You are good man,” she says. “Have heart too much. But no.”

  Rafferty says, without intending to speak out loud, “Poor kid.”

  “Yes,” Hwa says. “Poor kid.” She purses her lips as though sealing off something she wants to say. Then she steps back and puts a hand on the door. “We go tomorrow.”

  “Fine. Well, if you need anything …” He lets it trail off.

  “You do everything already.” She closes the door.

  ARTHIT’S CELL PHONE goes unanswered. Rafferty leaves a message, just thanking him for arranging for Anand to stay at the apartment, and calls Rose.

  “This man you left here is very handsome,” she says.

  “Good. You can look at him and give the remote to Miaow.”

  “She hid the remote.”

  Rafferty tries not to laugh and fails. “What’s she watching?”

  “Something from England. Everybody’s rich and they live in a big house and say awful things to each other.”

  “Could be anything.”

  “I want to look at Dr. Drew.”

  “Gosh,” he says. “That’s terrible.”

  “When do you come back?”

  “You mean you miss me?”

  “No, but maybe you can find the remote.”

  “I have to see Andrew’s father at one. So that’s, what, an hour and a half from now? Rose, let Anand answer the door. And neither of you should go out without Anand, and I don’t want either of you in the apartment alone, either.”

  There’s a moment of silence, and then she says, “That bad?”

  “It could be.”

  “All right. Should I take Miaow to my mother’s?”

  “Maybe. If I’m right, the people we have to worry about are cops. They’ll find you up there in no time.”

  “We could go to Fon’s again.”

  Neither of these solutions makes him happy. “Give me a few hours. Maybe we’ll all go up there.”

  Rose says, “We could take the TV.”

  “Fine,” he says, “as long as the remote stays here.”

  BOO SAYS IN Thai, “Tell me you’ve called because you have an idea.”

  Rafferty had decided against a sixth cup of coffee and is instead dredging his way through some almost cosmically sweet coffee-milkshake-sort-of-thing that he has privately dubbed a crappucino. “Not yet.” He’s speaking English, which Boo understands much better than he can speak it. “I have money for First Home. A couple of thousand dollars now, with a lot more to come as needed.”

  “That would probably help. But there’s nowhere here she’d be isolated from the other kids.”

  “How was it last night?”

  “They were all there in the morning.”

  “That’s something.” A beep in his ear announces an incoming call. He glances at it, doesn’t recognize the number, and ignores it.

  “But she’s not talking,” Boo says. “Not even to them. She just sat on the cot until Chalee went and got Katherine, and then she stood up and allowed Katherine to lead her to the toilet.”

  “Well. I guess that’s something. She trusts three people, to some extent.”

  “She trusts you most.”

  “I know, Boo, but it’s not possible, not now.”

  “When?”

  Well, Rafferty thinks, that’s the question, isn’t it? Boo has always cut to the center of things. “Maybe never. But I’ll come up with something.”

  After a moment, Boo says, “This must be because you are American.”

  “What must be?”

  “You always think you can make things work.”

  “I never think I can make things work,” Rafferty says. “I just say that because it keeps me from giving up. Look, I’ll bring the money by later. Maybe I should talk to Father Bill. It’s his place.”

  “You have to. I think one or two days, that’s all we’ve got. We have to find someone who knows how to take care of her. And a place where she can stay.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Rafferty pushes the cold glass away, brings up the missed call and punches return. It rings eight, nine times, and he hangs up.

  He’s got more than an hour before he’s due at Nguyen’s office. Not enough time to do anything worthwhile, too much time to waste. A snip of time that’s exactly the wrong size. If a day were a jigsaw puzzle, it would be a missing piece.

  He tries Arthit again. Still no answer.

  Okay. Question time. Why did anyone want the phone? What Arthit said, because their faces were on it? But that’s pretty thin: with almost seventy million faces in the kingdom of Thailand, searching for one or two is like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. To narrow the field, you’d need a line to these people, a link to one or more of Sawat’s victims.

  But let’s say that was the reason anyway. So with the phone in the hands of the police, why send someone after Miaow? They’d been seen by a dozen people when they trashed the vendor’s stand. What harm could Miaow possibly represent?

  Someone with a knife. Someone who meant to use it.

  He’s rubbed his finger on the wet side of his glass, and he’s drawing question marks on the table. If it’s not the pictures, what?

  The cops have the pictures now. There are cops involved in all of this—Sawat’s racket had to involve several highly-ranked officers. Arthit’s boss, Thanom, is the most probable link to Sawat, but he’s also the one who knows best that Miaow doesn’t have the phone. So why would he send that man after Miaow?

  It suddenly occurs to him that the man with the knife must have picked Miaow up at the apartment. Reflexively, he calls home and tells Rose that no one, not even Anand, is leaving the building until he, Rafferty, is back.

  He’s on his feet without even knowing he got up, standing next to the plate glass window and looking out at the heat of the day. Andrew, he thinks. Andrew had the phone overnight at his apartment. Maybe there’s something else on it, something worth killing a child for. Maybe Andrew saw something without knowing it.

  Thirty minutes left. He’ll walk to Nguyen’s office. That’ll use up at least twenty.

  The heat slaps him in the face as he steps outside, but it doesn’t sap the coil of uneasy energy at his core. As livid as he is about the threat to Miaow, there’s a new level of anxiety that’s all about Rose’s pregnancy. He hadn’t thought in the past that the idea of something happening to her could be any more agonizing than it already was, but this is in a whole new language.

  There are days when Bangkok strikes him as the world’s biggest juicer, a giant, malevolent machine devised solely to extract perspiration from the defenseless. He’s dragging his feet to stretch out the walk, and still he’s practically squirting sweat as he approaches the high steel gate of the Vietnamese Embassy and heads for the closed door with the urgent-looking red sign on it. As he reaches out to open it, his phone rings: same number as before.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Nguyen. Where are you?”

  “About to knock on the door or whatever the protocol is here.”

  “I’m not there,” Nguye
n says. He sounds agitated, more rattled that Rafferty can recall his being. “I’m at home. Something has happened. Please come here.”

  “Your apartment.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Please come now.”

  Nguyen disconnects. Rafferty glares at the phone for a moment and then turns back into the heat of the day.

  31

  Hooked and Landed

  THE LAST TIME Rafferty visited this apartment, his impression was one of precise control, an architectural equivalent to the way Nguyen oils his hair to paste every strand in place. The symmetry of the apartment—too rigid, too precious—made it feel like a diorama under glass.

  Now it looks like the entire place was picked up, turned sideways, and given a good shake.

  He pauses in the entrance to the living room, where the two blue couches are upside-down, their cushions slit and the stuffing scattered. Nguyen had greeted him at the door with a tight nod and then turned, leaving Rafferty to follow him inside. Over Nguyen’s shoulders, two compact, fit-looking men give him challenging stares until he looks elsewhere.

  One of them is short and broad-shouldered, with rapidly receding hair above a Pleistocene brow-ridge. The other is whippet-thin, with lips so narrow they look like they could draw blood. They both wear slacks and polo shirts and they put no visible energy into exuding charm.

  “These are Chinh and Homer,” Nguyen says without indicating which is which. “You have a policeman at your place. Can you trust him?”

  “He’s a friend. How do you know that I have—”

  “I called. It was the first thing I did when I came home and saw this.” Nguyen kicks some glistening white stuff, like the angel’s-hair they used to put on Christmas trees, probably an element in the couch’s stuffing. It drifts about a foot into the air and waffles down. “You called me to tell me someone chased Miaow with a knife,” he says, “because you were concerned about Andrew. I called your apartment because I wanted to tell Mrs. Rafferty and Miaow that they might think of going somewhere else.”

  “Thank you.”

  Nguyen gives him a brusque nod and watches as the other two men straighten the room, looking under and into everything they touch. “I’ve noticed that you feel most comfortable when you think you’re in charge,” Nguyen says, turning to him. Rafferty searches for a hint of humor in the man’s eyes but finds none. His face is stony with fury. “Would you like to ask questions, or should I just tell you about this?”