“What?” says the other man.
“He says fine, follow him back to the embassy and we can wait there again.”
“This is stupid,” the other man says. Then Rafferty hears nothing until the Infiniti’s driver says, “Scoot back as far as you can.” He manages to wriggle a few additional inches farther from the trunk lid. The driver pops the trunk and puts several big bags of food next to Rafferty, and then it’s dark again.
A moment later, the driver says, “Don’t eat any of that.”
“I’d like to get farther away from it. Are they still back there?”
“Don’t know. It must have looked like the trunk was empty.”
“Okay.” He feels a fizz of anxiety behind his breastbone. He’d hoped they would have peeled off by now. “Call Homer and tell him it’s showtime. Just put me on hold, I’m not going anywhere.”
A moment later, another call comes in on Rafferty’s phone, and Rafferty puts the driver on hold and says, “Yeah?”
“Where are you?” It’s Nguyen.
“Hard to tell, since I’m in the trunk, but we’ve finished at the fast-food place.”
“This is a bit labor-intensive. You’re tying up one of my drivers, and two more are racing their motors just inside the gate.”
“Those are my reserves.”
Nguyen says, “You spread yourself too thin.”
Rafferty can’t disagree, so he doesn’t argue. Instead, he resorts to explanation, “It’s about exposure. I need to make sure the kid I told you about is all right, because if she’s not, she could be used as a lever against me. Truth is, if I got a call saying someone has her, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Well, I’m not happy about it,” Nguyen says, “And you didn’t give me much time to argue. I could have sent men with you.”
“If I show up with an army, I’ll tip off Anna that I don’t trust her. What I need to do is to get to a point where I can walk in casually, with nobody following me, and say ‘Hi’ and figure out whether I’ve got to snatch the girl myself.” He puts Nguyen on hold and says to the driver, “Still back there?”
“Maybe not.”
“Well, keep your eye on the mirror in about sixty seconds. Nguyen is about to loose the lions.” To Nguyen, he says, “The cars that are at the gate, they’re SUVs with tinted windows, right?”
“That’s what you asked for.”
“Okay, good. Then, please, just tell them to leave. Out through the gate and into traffic, going as fast as they can.”
“And the people who are watching will follow them,” Nguyen says. “According to you.”
“And since the car I’m in is coming back with all this American food, I’m hoping they’ll call our tail off and put them into the game, too. And then I can get out of this damn trunk and flag a cab.”
“Very devious,” Nguyen says.
“Thank you. Please tell those cars to go.”
“Count to ten.” He closes the connection.
“They should be going any minute,” Rafferty says to the driver. “Keep your eye on the mirror.”
They hit a pothole, and Rafferty’s head emphatically meets the roof of the trunk. He’s still rubbing the sore spot when the driver says, “Four cars back, somebody just made a very fast turn into a soi.”
“If you had to bet, would you say yes or no?”
“Yes, but—”
“Okay. Turn into the next one-way soi and slow down. Keep your eyes on the mirror.”
The car sways as it turns left, and Rafferty pulls the lever that folds down the backseat. In less than a minute, he’s curled up on the folded-down backs of the seats.
“No one back there,” the driver says.
“Find a parking space and turn off the interior light, and thanks for everything.”
With the car stopped, the driver says, “Still no one.”
Rafferty pushes the back of the passenger seat forward, opens the door, and a moment later he’s sprinting up the sidewalk.
HE GETS OUT of the cab half a block from the alley. The moon is down, and in this run-down part of the city, with few streetlights and with the vast, unilluminated expanse of the river just blocks away, the darkness seems as concentrated as smoke.
He waits at the alley’s mouth, listening. The alley curves to the left, so he can’t see Boo’s building, only the walls of the structures on either side of the narrow passageway, blackened brick with small windows and a few old tin roofs. There are no lights in the windows. As dark as the street is, the alley is a different magnitude of darkness.
But, of course, that works both ways. If anyone is here, they won’t see him, either. It’ll be a blind date.
He chooses the wall on the right so he won’t be visible coming around the bend, and keeps a hand against the filthy brick as he moves. Involuntarily he thinks of Miaow, at four and five, negotiating alleyways like this, barefoot, alone, with no way of knowing what was waiting a few steps ahead. Not only Miaow: Boo, Chalee, Dok, and all of Boo’s charges. Thinks of Andrew, smart, coddled Andrew, hearing Miaow’s story for the first time and bursting into tears.
Thinks of Treasure, flaming with fever, collapsed in an alley like this one for Dok and Chalee to find. Chalee, running from her suicide-stained family to these alleys. Dok, small for his age and defenseless, on whatever miserable path led him to Boo’s shelter.
At the turn, he pauses. For all he knows, there’s a crowd waiting for him around the bend. He presses himself against the wall to reduce his profile and takes the curve slowly, studying, as it comes into view, each slice of the dead end containing Boo’s building. The building plugs the alley except for a supernaturally dark strip to the left, just wide enough to allow two people walking abreast to reach the next street.
Only one panel of the double door into the boys’ dormitory floor is open. The same dismal fluorescents are dispensing their miserly, arctic light. No figures in the doorway.
Just stroll in casually, someone who drops by every day. So he takes a last look around and walks toward the building as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Hi, how you doing, and what a surprise, Anna, to see you here.
He takes the two steps up and into the big room. Two of the cots are occupied by boys, the same newcomers as the night before, still dirty, but now on adjoining cots. When he comes in, their eyes snap to him, but until the moment they became aware of him, both had been looking to his left, toward the corner that houses Boo’s impromptu office.
He turns, too, and sees five children, boys and girls, pressed into and around the gap between the partitions, looking into the office. A moment later, he hears laughter—eight or ten kids by the sound of it. The children with their backs to him join in.
It takes him a few seconds to carve a passage, very gently, between the children at the door, smelling the essence of kids, the scent of hair and skin in need of a washing: the first smell he associated with Miaow. As the last children give way to let him by, he leans forward and looks into the room.
There are now nine chairs, both the metal ones and the rickety wooden ones Boo had been using. They’re all occupied; a handful of kids Rafferty hasn’t seen before, plus Boo and Chalee. In the front row is the boy with the scratches running down his face. Sitting in a corner, on Boo’s one good chair with her two friends between her and the rest of the room, is Treasure.
She’s almost smiling.
The laughter ceases the instant he comes in, and Anna, at the front of the room with Boo’s whiteboard behind, stops writing and turns to him. She communicates something in sign language, her hands flying, and then in her flat, uninflected voice, says, “We have a visitor.”
He knows how sensitive Anna is about the way she sounds when she speaks, and here she is, doing it in front of a room full of people.
Her eyes are shining, her face transparent with happiness. “Chalee and Dok and Treasure already know Khun Poke,” she says to the children, speaking the words as she signs them. “Khun Poke
is a famous writer. One day he’ll come back and talk to you all about writing. We all need to read and write well, isn’t that true, Khun Poke?”
Children turn to look to him, so intently it makes his ears ring, and he says, “Absolutely.”
Anna signs his answer and asks, “And why is that?”
“For—uhhh—joy?” he says. Feeling foolish, he smiles and points to the corners of his mouth. “And, and having a better life and even making money.”
“Khun Poke and his wife,” Anna says, “adopted a daughter from the street, and now she goes to a good school and when she’s grown up she’ll be able to be anything she wants, isn’t that right?”
“Anything,” Poke says, and his voice is unexpectedly fierce in his ears.
“Because she’s learned to read and write,” Anna says, signing away. “And you, all of you, can do the same. Remember, each and every one of you: you don’t have to live in the street. You can be whatever you want. You can have whatever you want.”
Dok says, “Can I have a computer?”
“You can have two of them, if you work hard enough. Chalee?”
Chalee sits up, startled.
“Can you pass out some of your paper? Does everyone have a pencil? Let me see the hands of anyone who didn’t bring a pencil.” No hands go up. “While I talk to Khun Poke, you copy three times the characters I wrote on the board, and then we’ll play a game with them. Ting?” A boy nods, and Anna begins signing and then says, for the benefit of the hearing students, “Ting will go to the board with Chalee and make the signs for mother, father, brother, sister, and hello, and Chalee will draw them on the board. We’ll try them when I get back. Remember,” she says to the children, “the best way to understand each other is to talk to each other.”
The kids at the door part as Rafferty and Anna come through. None of them is looking at Rafferty. The two newcomers on their cots watch Anna, too, but when she smiles at them, one looks down and the other turns his back. The one who looked down looks back up a second later.
Rafferty says, “I’m, um, amazed.”
“I talked to Father Bill yesterday,” Anna says. She’s gazing at him with such intensity he feels as though his reaction could decide her fate. “They’ve got seven non-hearing kids inside the compound, and they’re having trouble teaching them. I used to teach—I mean, back before—before—”
“Before they fired you,” Rafferty says, “because you didn’t tell the cops everything you knew about what I was doing.”
“Back then,” Anna says, and her discomfort about that time in their lives makes her blink rapidly and look down. “Father Bill said, if I can teach them at the same time I teach Treasure and Dok and Chalee, then Boo can keep Treasure here. We still have to find her a different room, but Boo will let the three of them sleep in the office for a while, and—well, who knows? Maybe she’ll make progress. Those two are angels.”
Rafferty is simultaneously delighted and ashamed of himself. He says, “This is better than anything I could have hoped for.”
“And for me,” Anna says, “for me, it’s like being let back into paradise. I’m back, I’m back working with children again.”
“Do they know Treasure’s story?”
“Not yet.” She clasps her hands in front of her chest as though she’s about to sing. Her face is more open than Rafferty has ever seen it. “We’re all going to write our stories, as soon as they can begin to scratch the first words. They’re all ashamed. Even here, with each other, they’re still ashamed. So first they’ll talk to each other and then they’ll write to each other, and when the secrets are out, they won’t be ashamed any more.”
Rafferty lets the words echo in his head for a moment, thinking of Miaow. He says, “You’re going to work a miracle.”
“That’s a teacher’s job,” she says.
“I need a minute with Treasure.”
“Out here?”
“No, if it’s okay with you, I’ll go in and talk with her. Just a few seconds.”
“Fine. So she can hear you over the kids, we’ll start with the signing. Chalee should have drawn them all by now.”
As they go back into the room, they find everyone turned to face them, except Chalee and the boy called Ting, who are still busy at the whiteboard. Rafferty edges between the chairs toward Treasure’s corner. Passing the chair Chalee had vacated, he sees on top of her stack of recycled paper another drawing of Sumalee, her sister. On impulse, he moistens an index finger and slides it off the stack, folding it into quarters. He slips the picture into his hip pocket and kneels down beside Treasure’s chair. When their heads are level, she pushes her chair back a few inches but holds his gaze.
“Anna can help you,” he says.
She looks down at the floor as though the words are an enormous disappointment. When her eyes come up, they go past him for a split second and then return to his. She says nothing.
“I have something I have to do. I should be finished tomorrow, maybe even tonight. Then I’ll come back. I’ll come every day.”
Her lips move silently, as though she’s making sure she has the sounds right, and she says, “I stay here?”
“Can you?” he asks. “For now? People here care about you.”
Her eyes dart past him again, looking at whatever she glanced at before, and then they come back, and she nods.
“See you tomorrow. I promise.” He gets up, wanting to touch her but afraid to violate the distance between them, and she extends a finger and snags the sleeve of his T-shirt as he rises. She allows the weight of her arm to hang from it for a second, and lets go. He reaches to pat her hand but pulls back, still not sure whether to touch her.
Turning to go, he sees the boy with the gouged cheek staring at him and he realizes who Treasure had been looking at. The boy avoids his eyes until Anna says, “Say goodbye to Mr. Rafferty, everybody,” and then the boy gives Rafferty the deep-dredged look he has seen from so many of these children, the look that says, So you’re not my adult, either.
43
Gravel in a Clothes Dryer
IT ISN’T UNTIL he’s dragged his regrets around the bend in the alley that he hears the men behind him.
He turns. Two figures saunter into sight and stop. They’re not particularly big and they’re not particularly powerful-looking, but there’s a kind of compressed violence in the way they face him. The smell of cigarette smoke makes them feel closer than they are. The one who’s smoking shifts his weight rapidly from foot to foot with an energy that might be chemical.
Rafferty backs up against the wall, putting the men to his right. Something in his gut crumples at the thought that he led them there, straight to Treasure, because he doubted Anna. Because he couldn’t trust the judgment of the best friend he’s ever had, who loves her. It takes an effort, but he pushes the despair aside and does a quick survey of the terrain. To his left is the mouth of the alley, the way he entered. Even with his eyes on the two to his right, he still sees, in his peripheral vision, the other two as they come in from the street.
One of them is the brutish-looking man who had tried to use his knife on Miaow.
Rafferty has nothing, not so much as a butter knife. His Glock is in the apartment. He’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes. And a belt.
At a signal he doesn’t see, all four men begin to move toward him.
If he goes right, he’ll have to get past the two he saw first, and he’d be leading them back toward Treasure, Anna, and the children. To his left, the alley leads to the street, to the occasional car, to the possibility of watching eyes, even allies.
Not a hard choice.
They’ve advanced four or five steps toward him now, and he sees what they want to do: they’re trying to form a semicircle, pushing him against the wall. As the brutish man pulls out his knife, the decision becomes much simpler.
Rafferty puts a steadying hand on the wall, trying to look irresolute, and his other hand goes to the heavy buckle of
his belt. It takes one snap to unfasten it. He angles right, his back to the street, as though he’s going to try to run back to Boo’s. When he’s facing away from the man with the knife, he tugs the belt, sliding it out of all but the last couple of loops on his jeans.
They’re about three meters from him at this point, and he knows he needs all that distance to work up some speed, so he pushes off the wall with his free hand and whirls, yanking the belt free and breaking into a run, sliding his hand down to the perforated end, leaving the heavy buckle hanging free. One of the men shouts a caution, but he drowns them out with a scream that surprises even him, and he swings the belt in a blurred, whirring circle over his head and leaps toward the man with the knife.
The man jumps back, but Rafferty is already leaning into another long stride, and then he swings the belt buckle down at a 45-degree angle, slashing it the full length of the man’s face.
Instinctively, the knifeman brings his hands up to his face, which is already pouring blood, and the other man takes a step back. Rafferty closes with the knifeman, grabs his hair with the hand holding the belt, yanks the man’s head up, and drives a straight, short left to his unprotected throat. Then he shoves the man straight at his partner, and while the knifeman is still making the cramped, agonized sound that’s probably supposed to be a scream, Rafferty is between him and the wall, running full out for the street.
He hits the sidewalk and sprints right, not thinking about anything except covering ground. He hears them behind him, at least two pair of feet, but he doesn’t want to turn and look. Coming up is a yellowish streetlamp, the only one on the block, throwing a jaundiced light that brings the buildings’ corners into sharp relief and reveals nothing in the way of help, not a pedestrian, not an open door, not a lighted window. He passes the light and, twenty meters ahead, he sees another lane, sloping down toward the river, on the other side of the street—the lane Chinh used to get here after they got lost—and he takes the diagonal, leaping off the curb and risking a quick look back. He sees three of them behind him, and then he’s across the road but he snags his toe on the opposite curb and almost goes down, fighting his own momentum and windmilling his arms to stay upright. He doesn’t fall, but they close half the distance, and Rafferty, still off balance, manages at the last moment to turn enough to slam his left shoulder against the brick, and at that instant he hears a sound that seems to punch him in the ear and something whines past his cheek and blows a cupful of brick from the wall.
For the Dead Page 30