The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

  He opens the cupboard door and settles back on his heels, his question forgotten.

  “Something to think about,” Arthit says, coming in. He looks down at Rafferty, who’s staring at the space beneath the sink and says, “Shit.”

  “This is impressive,” Rafferty says. He pulls out a big plastic tub piled high with empty whiskey bottles.

  “You should see the ones I left in the bars,” Arthit says. He comes over to Rafferty. “Give me that.”

  Rafferty slides it over to him, and Arthit picks it up with a little grunt.

  “Maybe it is impressive,” he says, putting it down again and dragging it across the floor toward the back door.

  Rafferty’s phone rings. He stands, fishes it out of his jeans, and says, “Ahh, my skyscraper darling.”

  “We’re on the way,” Rose says. “All of us.”

  “Good. We’re pretty much ready.” He thinks for a second about what she’s said, and he asks, “ ‘All’? What happened to ‘both’?”

  “All,” Rose says.

  Rafferty says, “Oh. Well, don’t forget the circling and double-backs and all that.”

  “Thanks,” Rose says. “I never would have remembered.” She hangs up, and he folds the phone and turns to Arthit, who’s coming back in. He says, “I’m sorry about this. I think we’ve got one extra coming.”

  Arthit stops, obviously processing the information, and then he tries on the smile again. It looks like he’s got gas. “No problem,” he says. “Invite everyone you know.”

  Chapter 22

  Generic Pictures of a White Male

  Poke asked an interesting question a while ago,” Arthit says. He’s showered and shaved and changed into a white dress shirt, tan slacks, and an awful pair of tartan plaid socks. He has a huge collection of bad socks, given to him by Noi as a birthday joke every year. “He knows where you live. He painted the door to tell you he could get to you, and then he disappeared. What’s he doing?”

  “It’s only been a few days,” Rose says. “Since Saturday.” She’s sharing the couch with Miaow and Pim, whom she’s apparently adopted permanently. Pim hasn’t raised her eyes from the floor since the moment she realized she was in a cop’s house. They’ve all got glasses of iced coffee, rich with sweetened condensed milk, except for Miaow. Miaow brought two six-packs of Cokes just in case and is working on her second can.

  Rafferty, framed in the sunlight that’s streaming through the front window, settles into his armchair, takes a polite sip, fights down a grimace at the sugar, and says, “You’re the only one who knows him. Is he someone who sits around and waits for things?”

  “No. He decides to do something and he does it. He wants things when he wants them. He’s not careful, at least not about things that might be dangerous. He goes skydiving, he climbs rocks. And look at the way he came back into the Candy Cane to get me so soon after he took Oom. That wasn’t careful.”

  “It was impulsive,” Arthit says. “But if he’s impulsive, why hasn’t he tried to get to you? He had that guy, that guy—”

  “John,” Rafferty says.

  “John. He had John following Poke—and maybe you, for all we know—just getting information. But he already knew where you lived. He and John, the two of them, could have waltzed into that apartment in the middle of any night of the week and done whatever they wanted.”

  “Not to be immodest, but I was there,” Rafferty says.

  “These guys aren’t going to worry about a travel writer,” Arthit says.

  “Well,” Rafferty says, “I’m not just a travel writer.”

  “Of course not.” Rose passes her fingertips over the condensation on the side of her glass and pats the side of her neck with the cool water. In Thai she says, “But they have no way of knowing how lethal you are.”

  “You think he’s a soldier,” Arthit says to Rose, ignoring Rafferty. “But his visas say ‘businessman.’ And what kind of soldier gets so much time off?”

  “He’s a soldier,” Rose says.

  “Jesus, we’re slow,” Rafferty says. “He’s both. He’s a mercenary.”

  “The talon,” Arthit says, sitting up. “I knew I’d seen it before. He’s Grayhawk.”

  “They’re both Grayhawk,” Rafferty says.

  Rose says, “What’s Grayhawk?”

  “Contractors,” Rafferty says. “Hired guns. The guys who kill people on behalf of the Land of the Free when a war is unpopular and the president doesn’t want military casualties. The guys who shot a lot of those folks in Iraq and are shooting folks now wherever freedom is threatened.”

  “That’s a cynical attitude,” Arthit says.

  “Well, excuse me,” Rafferty says. “And not to digress from the matter at hand, but I think all the world’s professional politicians, every single one of them, should be herded together and imprisoned permanently beneath a giant glass bell jar and fed a diet of issues and causes. We could use the gas they generate as an energy source. Enough to light whole cities.”

  Arthit says, “That’s hardly a digression at all.”

  “I just thought we should get it on the table.”

  “Grayhawk guys are not tabby cats,” Arthit says.

  “Howard is very dangerous,” Rose says.

  “Old John let me stick chili up his nose pretty easily,” Rafferty says.

  Pim says, “I was there. You were lucky.”

  “Yeah,” Rafferty says. “I was.” To Arthit he says, “Where do we start to look for him?”

  “What hotel did he stay at?” Arthit asks Rose.

  “The Royal Orchid. Always, at least when he was with me.”

  Arthit asks Rafferty, “Sound like a starting point? Not that he’s likely to use the same hotel much.”

  “I’ll check it out—”

  “No you won’t,” Arthit says. His cell phone rings. “Yes?” He glances over at Rafferty and nods. “Thanks, e-mail it and we’ll take a look. When will you guys be here?” He glances at his watch and says to Miaow, “What time is your rehearsal?”

  Miaow’s eyebrows go up in surprise. “Two. It starts in sixth period.”

  “One-thirty,” Arthit says into the phone. “See you then.” He disconnects and says, “Come with me, Rose.”

  Rafferty says to his receding back, “What do you mean, I won’t check it out? Who will?”

  Rose gets up and follows Arthit into the dining room with Rafferty trailing along behind, his question unanswered. Arthit lifts the lid on a laptop that’s sitting on the dining-room table and brings up Gmail. At the top of the messages in his in-box is one with the subject heading HORNER. Arthit opens it and clicks on the first attachment.

  A fuzzy, low-res black-and-white picture of Howard Horner fills the screen. He’s got glasses on, and he’s puffed out his cheeks with just enough air to change the shape of his face. He’s also tilted his head back so the glasses are bouncing light into the camera lens, making his eyes invisible.

  “That’s not him. Is it?” Miaow asks from behind them.

  “Exactly,” Arthit says. He flicks through the other attachments. There are six of them in all, generic pictures of a white male in his early thirties. Beards and mustaches come and go, as do a couple of wigs and several pairs of glasses. “He’s good at this.”

  “No one will recognize him from these,” Rose says, and then she straightens and says, “Oh.”

  Rafferty says, “Oh?”

  “We need to go back in the other room and sit down.”

  Arthit says, “If you say so,” and he gets up, and they all follow Rose.

  “Give me a second,” she says, sitting back down on the couch. She picks up her glass of iced coffee and drains it, then closes her eyes for a second, and then she says, “He’s got another one.”

  “Another girl,” Rafferty says.

  “Sure. That’s why he was in Patpong the night we saw him in the restaurant. That’s why he’s leaving me alone right now. He does one thing at a time. He gives it—he gave me�
��all his attention. He’s working on some girl right now. When he’s finished with her, or when there’s a natural break in the, the courtship, he’ll get around to me.”

  “A girl in Patpong,” Arthit says. “How many years has it been?’

  Rose slides her fingertips around through the coating on the inside of her empty glass and then licks them. “He took me in 1998, 1999. He spent months with me, off and on, until he took me to Phuket. So eleven years, twelve years.”

  “Probably feels safe to him again by now,” Rafferty says. “People have forgotten him. Lots of girls have quit, new girls everywhere.”

  “He likes newer girls,” Rose says, with an involuntary glance at Pim. “They’re dumber.”

  “This turns things around,” Rafferty says.

  Arthit says, “Not with what we just got.”

  Rose says, “What turns what around? And what did we just get? I hate it when you two do that.”

  “He doesn’t know where you are, right now,” Rafferty says, “but we know where he is, or at least where he’s going to be. In Patpong, working on some girl. But we don’t have a good—”

  “Thirty bars,” Arthit interrupts. “Five thousand farang men on any given night. We need a much better picture.”

  Rose says, “That’s the other part of ‘Oh.’ I think I’ve got one.”

  “You kept his picture?” Miaow says in disbelief.

  “I forgot,” Rose says. “In the suitcase I took on the boat, I had a little camera, one of the old ones you use once and then throw away. I bought it for the trip and never touched it again. If the film is still any good, there are ten or fifteen pictures of Howard in it.”

  “Where?” Rafferty asks.

  “In a cardboard box with a lot of things I never use, on the top shelf of the closet.” She closes her eyes and says, “On the right. Behind the iron and that machine you bought to write down all the things you said into the tape recorder you were going to use for your writing.”

  “The transcription machine.” Another burst of enthusiasm gathering dust.

  “That. Behind that.”

  “One of those little cardboard cameras? Yellow or something?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have it developed,” Arthit says. “When Poke comes back from Miaow’s rehearsal, he can stop at the apartment and get it, and give it to Kosit.”

  Rafferty says, “Kosit?”

  “You remember Kosit. Older cop, leathery face, got—”

  “I remember Kosit. Why will Kosit be at my—”

  Arthit waves him off. “Because he’s going with you. Also, a kid named Anand. Patrolman on his way up, if I have anything to say about it. He’s the one—I think I told you about this—who gave me the money when all the other cops were looking for me. He found me trapped at the top of a flight of stairs in an apartment building, threw me all the money he had, and went down to tell his sergeant that nobody was up there.” He swallows, cups his hands, and rubs his face with them. “That was the night Noi died.”

  Rafferty lets a few seconds creep by and says, “Arthit. You can’t just assign cops to us like we’re visiting Saudis.”

  “They’re on special assignment,” Arthit says. “To the national hero.”

  “Boy, are you squeezing that.”

  “Why not? It’s not going to last forever. As soon as Thanom can stuff me into a box and nail the lid shut, he will. He hates that I get all the attention, even if he does jam himself into every picture.” Thanom, Arthit’s boss, is a guaranteed first-ballot occupant of the Police Corruption Hall of Fame, and Arthit has been a stone in his shoe for years. “Kosit and Anand will check the Royal Orchid,” Arthit continues. “And they’ll be wherever Miaow is. When you’re with her, they’ll stay out of sight on the assumption they’ll be able to spot the watchers and get in the middle if anything happens. When you’re not with her, they’ll be visible, so nothing does happen.”

  “What about Rose?” Rafferty asks.

  Arthit says, “Rose isn’t going anywhere.”

  Rose says, “Excuse me?”

  “Good,” Rafferty says to Arthit. “You keep her in line. And call me once in a while to let me know how you’re doing.” He checks his watch and stands up. “If he’s really found a new one, and if we can get a good picture, we might be able to turn this whole thing around.”

  Arthit says, “Maybe.”

  “Before he finishes with the girl,” Rose says.

  Chapter 23

  An Indigestible Lump of Exposition

  Prospero’s island, or at least the part of it that’s visible to the audience, is a rugged, steep-sided rock that juts up almost vertically on the left and then crinkles its way down on the right, ending offstage. It lifts its craggy silhouette against the unbroken gray of a cyclorama, one long piece of seamless fabric that curves all the way around the back of the stage, from the floor to the top of the audience’s sight line, and which is lighted the color of gunmetal for these act 1 moments following Prospero’s magical storm. Later in the production, as the day wears on, different lighting will turn it turquoise, but for now the gray is fine, easy on Rafferty’s tired eyes.

  The vertical edge of the rock begins its thrust about four feet from the curtains on the left edge of the stage, leaving room for actors to come and go. That’s Rafferty’s left, as he faces the stage, but for the actors, who are facing out, it’s stage right. Mrs. Shin, in giving direction, always means stage right and stage left, even when she says only, “Cross right” or “A few steps left.” So: stage right; stage left; upstage, or away from the audience; and downstage, or toward it—the points of the theatrical compass.

  Everyone in the room except Rafferty, and probably Kosit and Anand, understands it instinctively.

  A big, irregular, dark-looking cave, Prospero’s hangout, punctuates the rock face at about center stage, and a huge clutter of driftwood has been stacked just to one side. The pile of driftwood is on a hinge, and on the back of it—the side that’s invisible to the audience at the moment—is a bunch of heavy canvas framed and painted to look like rocks. The unit will be swung around to provide scenery for the clown scenes—what Rafferty, who shortened them for weeks, thinks of as the endless clown scenes—and also to mask part of the cave.

  Beginning high on top of the island, a rough-hewn stairway of sorts has been incised into the rock. It appears near the pinnacle and then angles back and forth all the way down to the stage floor. This was designed to be used by arriving and departing actors, but Mrs. Shin has been worried about the stairway since long before the set was built, anxious that someone might fall through it and get hurt. She’s decided, as she sets the action of the play, that the stairway belongs exclusively to Ariel, since Miaow is by far the lightest child in the cast. Miaow has tried not to look smug at having an entrance only she can use.

  Rafferty is sitting next to Mrs. Shin, about eight rows back from the stage, feeling like he’s entered an enchanted world. This is the first time he’s seen the entire set with most of the lighting, and it’s turned the auditorium into a sorcerer’s stony realm, completely sealed off from the urban friction of Bangkok and the real-life drama of the past few days. The school’s theater accommodates about four hundred people in rows of hard, fold-down wooden seats—another reason to shorten the play—set in front of a classic proscenium stage, complete with a small orchestra pit and a curtain. For The Tempest the curtain has been festooned with cloth seaweed in half a dozen shades of green and brown, with sparkles glued here and there. Some kelpy pieces are ten or fifteen feet high, extending all the way from the floor of the stage to the top of the proscenium arch. Mrs. Shin was not allowed to sew the seaweed to the curtain, so every now and then Rafferty sees the glint of safety pins.

  He likes the safety pins. They seem appropriate to the production, a bit of inexpensive practicality in the middle of all the magic.

  The boy playing Prospero, a Chinese kid named Luther So, is onstage now and is not having a good
time portraying age. He’s presenting Shakespeare’s magician as a stiff-kneed hunchback who walks high-shouldered and bent over, leaning on his magician’s staff and frequently grabbing his back as though in pain. Every time he takes a step, Mrs. Shin says quietly, “Oh, dear,” and finds a way to keep him still.

  “Why don’t you just have him stand there through the whole play?” Rafferty asks behind his hand. “The other actors can hang hats on him.”

  “He speaks the verse very well,” Mrs. Shin says. “He understands every word. And it’s unusual for a ninth-grader to have such a strong lower register.”

  “And such a weak lower back.”

  “Shhh.” But she’s smiling.

  Privately Rafferty thinks it wouldn’t matter if the kid played the whole role stark naked on a unicycle, because no one, or at least no one who’s male, will ever see him. Siri Lindstrom, who’s been assigned the role of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, is an incipient heartbreaker, the kind of girl who seems to carry her own breeze with her. Her ash-blond hair, which falls to the middle of her back, is constantly in motion, framing a face having nothing wrong with it that’s big enough to see with the unaided eye. The first time she came onstage, Kosit, sitting three rows back, said something that made Anand laugh. Mrs. Shin had twisted around toward them.

  “My police escort,” Rafferty said.

  “What an interesting life you lead.” Mrs. Shin looks up at Siri, who’s huddled with Luther running through the lines of the play’s eternal second scene, in which Prospero explains the whole backstory to his daughter, starting before she was born. It seems to take as long to tell as it did to happen. Siri’s wearing a great many yards of muslin, draped in layers around her like she’s just come from some celestial steam bath. All the actors are in working costumes, rough muslin approximations of their ultimate outfits, so they can learn how to move in them without falling on their faces. Siri seems to be having no problem with hers, but she could probably dance on pointe in full body armor. “Wait till they see her in the real dress,” Mrs. Shin says, regarding her. “She’s breathtaking.”