His face is stinging. He knows he’s bleeding from sharp-edged brick fragments. He can’t outrun the gun, so he turns and lets his arms drop to his sides and watches them come.
The yellowish streetlight is behind them, stretching the men’s shadows toward Rafferty so that the dark imprints of their heads and shoulders extend almost to his feet. The man holding the gun is in front. The other two are slightly behind him, about two meters away from him on either side, deployed as though they expect him to try to run. The man on the right talks into a cell phone.
The one with the gun says, “Don’t move an inch.”
The one to the left says, in English, “And drop your belt.”
“Drop your belt?” Rafferty says, letting it fall at his feet. “That’s heroic dialogue.”
“The hero,” says the man with the gun, “is the one who wins.”
“Can I move now?”
“If you want me to shoot you.”
“I actually don’t think,” Rafferty says, “that your boss wants you to kill me.”
“Yeah?” the man with the phone says, putting it away. “Think again.”
A sound like gravel in a clothes dryer, but full of rage, makes the man with the gun look over his shoulder. The knifeman, his face and shirt black with blood in the sodium-yellow light, hobbles out of the alley, one hand at his throat and the other holding the knife. The man with the gun says, “He’s got a problem with you.”
The three of them are standing in the street, too far from Rafferty for him to move on them, but close enough to shoot him. The knifeman drags himself along, one eye swollen closed in the canyon gouged by the belt buckle, his bared teeth the only light in his face. The other men fan out to give him a wider passage and, perhaps, to get away from the knife.
An absolutely blinding tide of rage—this piece of gutter shit chased Miaow with a knife—washes through Rafferty, sweeping away his lifelong dread of knives, and he says, “Come on, motherfucker.”
The man with the knife leaps.
“Hey,” the man with the gun says. It’s a warning, and the one with the phone shouts something to echo it, but his voice is drowned out by the roar of a motor, and out of the lane leading down to the river comes a black SUV, angling right and cutting the corner so tightly its wheels bounce onto the sidewalk and down again as it surges past Rafferty, scattering the men in the street like bowling pins. The vehicle clips the man with the gun and sends him spinning and then accelerates straight at the knifeman, blocking him from Rafferty’s view until he hears a kind of wet impact he knows immediately he’ll never forget, and the vehicle backs up, away from the thing crumpled in the street, and one door opens wide with Chinh at the wheel, and Nguyen says, “Get in.”
44
He Can’t Shelter Them Indefinitely
“I WOULD HAVE been there a little earlier,” Chinh says, “but I got lost again.”
“I think it timed out nicely,” Rafferty says. He hears the vapidity of his reply, but he’s in the grip of an elation—I’m alive!—that even the sight of his bleeding face in the mirror can’t douse. From the moment he saw the knifeman dragging himself into that street, he’d figured it was over.
But now, he’ll be here for the birth of his child. He’ll be here to do for Miaow and Rose whatever they’ll let him do.
“This was, if you’ll excuse my saying so, stupid,” Nguyen says from the backseat. “As close as we are now, you could have endangered all of it.”
“I know it was. I led them here, thinking that Anna—”
“You assume responsibility somewhat promiscuously,” Nguyen says, and Rafferty realizes he’s hearing the tone that’s shaped Andrew. “You weren’t followed. Your friend’s woman was. She didn’t tell her driver to check. And at the risk of wrenching us back into the present, twenty minutes after you got out of that Infiniti, Ton left his house. He hasn’t come back. And it’s—what?—almost two hours now. He’s out of sight, we have no idea where. Let’s just suppose those idiots had captured you instead of trying to kill you. Let’s just suppose you and they and Ton were in a room somewhere right now, and your friend with the knife was whittling at your answers.”
“But I’m here,” Rafferty says. He leans closer to the mirror, which is on the back of the passenger-seat sunshade. There’s a sliver of brick protruding from the skin beneath his right ear. “How do you know he left?”
“Obviously,” Nguyen says, and from the sound of his voice, his teeth are clenched, “I had someone on the street. If you’d stayed where you belong—”
“I’m a member of your team,” Rafferty says, turning around to face him, “not a hand puppet. Get over it. Oh, and here’s a present, the reason Arthit couldn’t match any of Sawat’s crimes to the victim counts mentioned on the video. Ton chose crimes that had nothing to do with him. Sawat’s murder would still look like a revenge killing, but no one would be led back to any of the murders Ton profited from. Nothing would point to him.”
“Could be.” Nguyen sighs, probably his version of relaxing, Rafferty thinks, and sits back for the first time.
“I need to yank some stuff out of my face,” Rafferty says to Chinh. “Can you pull over for a minute?”
“At the hotel,” Nguyen says. “We can’t go back to the embassy until this is over.” He looks at his watch. “We’ve only got until the embassy opens tomorrow, when Secretary Tran will have to back off.”
“What happens then?”
“Whatever Ton can get away with. Probably starting with the arrests of your friend and Colonel Thanom. I’m going to be fine one way or the other,” he says. “My family and I are shielded. But everyone else is just hanging in the open. Your man Ton has a lot of power.”
“And Tran will stick to that deadline.”
“He’s not the president of Vietnam,” Nguyen says. “He’s a diplomat. He can’t shelter Thai citizens like Arthit and his woman and Thanom from the authorities indefinitely. And you, you’re a floater. You could make a run for the American embassy, but I doubt Mrs. Rafferty and Miaow could get in.”
“We’re going to get him,” Rafferty says, “and we’re going to do it before your fucking deadline.”
They drive on in a thick, pressurized silence.
IT STRETCHES INTO the longest night of Rafferty’s life.
Since they can’t go back to the embassy, they trek from hotel to hotel until they find one that still has a fax in a guest room, and then they move again when the fax is out of order. They end up in a suite big enough to sleep eight very wealthy people, but the fax is right there on the desk, and the test page Clemente sends comes in just fine.
“Both versions of the chart,” Rafferty says. “The one with just Ton in the middle and the one with Jurak in there, too, and mock up the phony police ID card, make it look like yours, with Jurak’s picture.”
“Already done,” she says on the other end of the line.
“Great, great.” He yawns, more nerves than exhaustion, and checks his watch. Almost 2:30. “Listen, just send everything you’ve got.” He gives her the number.
“Fine,” Clemente says. “Anything else?”
“Wake Andrew up. I need another hard copy of the picture from the iPhone. Send me that, too, best resolution you can get. And anything else you think might be interesting.”
“Done,” she says. “Your wife has come in three times to ask if you’re okay. Said she didn’t want to bother you.”
“Tell her I’m in the lap of luxury. Arthit is right about you,” Rafferty says. “You’re ready for the big time.”
He hangs up and looks across the room at Nguyen, who is on the other phone, talking for perhaps the twentieth time to the man watching Ton’s mansion. Nguyen feels his gaze and shakes his head, then cuts off the call.
“A famous Vietnamese soldier once said that waiting was worse than fighting,” he says. “I never knew what he meant until now.” He looks at his own watch, and his phone rings.
He holds the phone to hi
s ear for a moment or two and then closes his eyes in what looks like resignation. Into the phone, he says, “How long can you hold him?” Shakes his head at what he’s hearing. To Rafferty, he says, “They’re going to have to cut Jurak loose pretty quick. Either that or book him formally.”
“They can’t book him,” Rafferty says. “If it gets into the computer system, someone will call Ton within ten minutes.” He looks at his watch again; it’s been three minutes. In seven hours or so, Tran will lift the protective blanket. “Do they have a fax at the station?” he says, as the fax in the hotel room whirs into action.
“Hold on.” Nguyen repeats the question into the phone and says, “They’ve got one.”
“Get the number and ask them to stand right at the machine in about five minutes. Maybe the fake ID cards will scare him into talking.” Rafferty gets up and checks the fax machine as the first of the two charts begins to slide out. “Where the hell is Ton?”
Half an hour after the last of Clemente’s faxes arrive and the phony police ID card with Jurak’s picture on it has been sent off to Arthit, Poke goes into one of the big bedrooms and lies down, feeling as rigid as a two-by-four. There are no comfortable positions, and his eyelids won’t stay down. He’s about to add sleep to the growing list of things he’s not good at, but then he’s gone.
NGUYEN’S TOUCH BRINGS him to a full sitting position even before his eyes are open. Through the window, he sees the first paling in the eastern sky. Nguyen says, “It’s five eighteen. Ton has just pulled into his driveway.”
45
The Light in the Window
IT TAKES THE man at the gate almost ten minutes to allow Rafferty in. In that time, the triangular fragment of paper Rafferty gave the guard has been passed to an elegantly dressed servant—a butler of some sort, probably—and carried into the house, mostly dark at this hour. Rafferty and the guard share the warming dawn in silence, while around the corner, the SUV ticks as the engine cools and Nguyen cools too, livid at Rafferty’s insistence on going in alone and convinced in the end only by Rafferty’s repeated reminder that it was his child Ton had attempted to kill.
He catches himself patting his hip pocket for the third time. The items in it feel thin and flimsy, nowhere near substantial enough to do what he hopes they’ll do to Ton’s life.
He has no backup plan if Ton won’t see him. He’s never wanted to take it to court. It’s possible that the case isn’t strong enough for court, given Ton’s prominence. So if the butler calls from the house and tells him Ton has no interest in seeing the rest of the page the triangle was cut from, Rafferty figures he’ll be running for his life, and everyone else will be tossed out of the embassy by 8:30. And if that’s the way it plays out, he and Rose and Miaow might have to find a way out of Thailand for good. As a drifter with no diplomatic armor, he could be killed and no one would make a huge fuss. And Miaow and Rose? A street child and a former prostitute? Wouldn’t even make the papers.
The house is big, white, and vaguely American-Southern. Give it some pillars and an oak tree or two, and a Thai Scarlett O’Hara would look right at home, fanning herself or patting talcum on her neck as she sips a Mekong. There’s a big window to the left of the door, dimly lighted. Rafferty’s guess is that it’s the living room and that the light is coming either from the entrance hall, which had looked quite bright when the butler came out and went back in, or from a room behind it: a dining room, perhaps. Above the front door, but staggered to the right, are two mullioned windows. They look as though the room they open into is halfway up the stairs Rafferty glimpsed in the entrance hall.
The lights behind those two windows had snapped on a moment after the butler took the piece of paper into the house. Now, as the stars disappear overhead and sweat begins to prickle the back of Rafferty’s neck, he hears movement behind him and turns to see two of the men from the alley, one of them the man who’d had the phone. They’re coming at him slowly but with obvious intent. They plan to beat him to death.
“Hey,” Rafferty says to the guard, backing up a step. “Did you know these guys were coming?”
The guard looks past him and says to the men, “Stop. I gotta call about this,” and reaches for the phone. At that moment, it rings. The guard picks it up, listens, and says, “Yes, sir.” He turns to Rafferty. “You’re in.” The gate begins to glide inward. “Don’t get him mad.”
Rafferty says, “I’ll do my best.” The other two men eye him like waiting vultures as he walks through the gate.
HE FOLLOWS THE servant through the door into the bright hallway. White polished marble on the floor, a ballroom-size chandelier dangling overhead, and, in the relative dimness of the living room, heavy brocades hanging on the walls like paintings.
“Please,” the butler says in English, inviting Rafferty in. He leads Rafferty to the stairs, and Rafferty follows, consciously slowing his breath and trying to locate a center of calm. For an instant he wishes he were better dressed and immediately abandons the thought: as if there were any proper dress for an occasion like this one. He counts the stairs to quiet his mind, to sharpen his sense of the moment.
Halfway up, the stairs broaden into a landing with a door to the right. The butler puts his hand up to knock, but instead looks directly into Rafferty’s eyes. For three or four seconds, the two men gaze at each other, and then the butler lowers his eyes and knocks. Without waiting for permission, he opens the door and steps aside.
Ton is sitting behind a polished black wooden desk, in the circle of light thrown by a porcelain lamp. The only object on the desk in front of him is the triangle of paper Rafferty gave to the guard.
Rafferty hasn’t seen him in person since the party at Pan’s house all those years ago. Their interaction—and there had been quite a bit of it, mostly threats—had been through intermediaries and on the telephone. The man who regards him through gray-tinted glasses looks like he’s aged double-time, although Rafferty thinks he’s probably one of those people whom time skips for years and years and then catches up to all at once. He’d been smooth-faced and strong-jawed then, but now the skin beneath the jaw is looser, the lines around the sharp-cornered mouth more deeply engraved, the hair too black to be natural.
Ton says, “You know what time it is.”
Rafferty says, “Yes.”
“I’ll give you ten minutes.” Ton touches the piece of paper with an index finger, pushing it partway across the desk. “Starting with this.”
“If you’re going to give me ten minutes,” Rafferty says, “they’re mine to use as I want, and I want to begin with this.” He takes the folded papers from his hip pocket and opens the top one. He turns it right-side up for Ton and puts it on the desk. In the eternal half-light of that penciled window, Chalee’s sister gazes up at Ton.
“Her name was Sumalee,” Rafferty says in English; Ton’s is as good as his. “She lived in Isaan.”
“Really,” Ton says. His tone says he’s humoring Rafferty, but not for long.
“I’m going to begin this conversation with two little girls,” Rafferty says, “because I can’t think of a better way to convince you of the depth of the malice I feel toward you. And you need to understand just how much I hate you if you’re going to believe that I mean what I came here to say.”
Ton passes a hand over his hair, sighs, and says, “So. What was her name again?”
“Sumalee. It means flower.”
“I know what it means,” Ton says.
“Sumalee.” Rafferty tows an ornate chair over to the desk but doesn’t sit. “The picture was drawn by her sister, Chalee. Sumalee was fourteen when Chalee first drew the picture. She draws it over and over now.”
“I can hear the clock ticking.”
“I said she lived in Isaan, right?”
Ton glances at the drawing again and then, to signal he’s finished with it, turns it around so it’s facing Rafferty once more. “You know you did.”
“About a month after Chalee drew that picture for t
he first time, her family lost the plot of land they grew rice on. To a foreclosure mill called the Northeast Farmer’s Trust. One of your companies.”
Ton spreads his hands but says nothing, but his eyes are on Rafferty’s.
“And Sumalee’s father decided that the only way to pay the debt was to sell Sumalee into the sex trade. Sumalee hanged herself. So I guess she’s fourteen forever.”
Ton shakes his head. “There are people who can’t manage money. It’s regrettable, but—”
“I feel terrible about Sumalee,” Rafferty interrupts, “but—man to man? It’s sort of … theoretical. I know these things happen—hell, part of it happened to my own wife. Her family raises rice, too. But here comes something that isn’t even remotely theoretical.”
“You really are idling through your time.”
“This is the other little girl,” Rafferty says, putting a photograph on the desk. “My daughter, Miaow. You sent a man to kill her several days ago.”
“Nonsense. If someone injured your daughter, that’s regrettable, but I had nothing to—”
“My guess is that you don’t get interrupted much,” Rafferty says over him. He puts a foot on the arm of the brocaded chair and watches Ton’s face stiffen. “But here I am, interrupting you. You sent the man who tried to kill my daughter, and that I take very personally indeed. This evening I think I crushed his larynx, a couple of minutes before some friends of mine ran over him. But that’s nothing compared to what I’m going to do to you.”
For the Dead Page 31