“I’ll make a new column,” Edward suggests. “It’ll let you look at the . . . the murders in sequence.”
“Great idea,” Clemente said. “Hang on, I’m looking. First put the date your father disappeared. He’s row four.”
“Got it.” He looks down at the tablet, probably, Rafferty thinks, at the date he’s just written, and swallows.
“What are they entering?” Arthit says.
“The dates the victims were found. We’ve got three so far, plus Edward’s father. Can you get the dates for all of them? Clemente could only get two boxes of effects today, and I brought Dependahl’s with me.”
“Sure.”
“And we need more effects. Clemente got some pushback.”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Clemente says. “I should be able to get two or three more.”
Arthit says, “You heard her.”
“And finally, can you talk a hotel into letting me in under an assumed name? I mean, they’ll know my name and they’ll get my credit cards, but they need to route calls to me under a different name.”
“You think the phone numbers are alive?”
“Hang on.” To Edward he says, “Have you guys got those dates in?”
“Yes.”
“What was the date when the one who wrote down Lala’s name turned up in a canal?”
“Ummmm . . . 2014, May 2014.”
“And the one who had the number but not the name?”
“That was 2011.”
“Six years ago and three years ago. Yeah, the number might still be working. And the name, Lala, that’s in Edward’s father’s things. So she—”
“Or maybe they,” Clemente says.
“Right, she or they are still active even if the number has changed. If you can get me a business name or something to match the number and give me a running start at a conversation, I can call them.”
“And?”
“And see what I can find out, what kind of business they say they’re running, whatever. Unless you want the cops to do it, which would make me very happy.”
Arthit is silent for a long moment, and Clemente is looking at Rafferty and shaking her head decisively, the corners of her mouth pulled down, the “no” unmistakable from twenty meters away. “There have been . . . a lot of these,” Arthit finally says. “No solutions, not even a suspect. We’re not that hapless. I think it’s very probable that money changed hands, possibly several times. The cops who got it and the cops they shared it with are going to pay close attention to anyone who stirs this up.” He says, “What?” and it’s evident he’s talking to someone who’s come into the room. “Hold on a minute, Poke.”
Rafferty waits, trying to pull himself slowly enough off the back of the couch that he won’t make that rude noise. He’s just succeeded when Arthit says, “Phone number’s no good. It’s a mobile, and it’s a burner. They’re being careful.”
“And they have good reason. So I’ll place a call,” Rafferty says. “Put me in a good hotel, one that says I have enough money to get their attention.”
20
Hates Hates Hates
Lala hates this heat.
She’s believed for years that she was reincarnated from a cold country, where there’s lots of clean white snow covering up all that irritating color and taking the edges off the landscape, where the stars gleam in the winter skies as though they were frozen in place, where everyone wears lovely layers of soft clothes. Where people never sweat and they have pale skin and red, red cheeks.
She hates how dark she is, dark as a sunburned rice farmer.
She hates the town she fled from, and she hates Bangkok. She hates that you can only see vistas in the city by going to the top of a high building. Some of the tall new ones have bars and restaurants on their roofs so you can get a cold drink in this awful heat, maybe even feel the breeze, and see for miles. She’s felt hemmed in ever since she got here, always afraid she wouldn’t see the enemy coming until it was on top of her, and there’s always an enemy somewhere, so she likes vistas, but . . .
She hates heights.
And she hates the Thai Ploughman’s Bank. The line in front of her is so slow it’s as though the bank won’t wait on you until it’s your birthday. This is the part of the game she hates most because it’s the most dangerous. But she has to do it. Kang certainly can’t. And it’s not only that he refuses to talk unless it’s absolutely necessary; the voice is the lesser problem. Nobody who sees Kang ever forgets him. Someone who’s lost an eye and won’t put a patch over the socket, who outweighs three average people combined, and looks like he can bench-press two hundred kilos with his ears, someone like that stands out in people’s memories. Lala may be dark and short, but that can be taken care of temporarily with creams and powders and high heels, and she has the ability to look like half a dozen other women, depending on what she’s wearing. When she puts on certain kinds of clothes, when she lightens her skin and darkens her lips, when she slides her feet into heels and chooses a wig that goes with the clothes, she feels herself turn into that other woman. Her voice changes, her intonations change. Now that she’s in her mid-thirties—well, mid–late thirties—she feels like a whole gallery of other women, women she can slip into and out of like slipping into and out of a bathrobe.
It’s a skill she learned as a cherry girl. No two men want exactly the same girl. And even the steady customers usually want something new; they want the same girl to be a different girl. So she learned how to do that. She learned how to be the gentle sweetheart, the shy schoolgirl, the confidante, the comforter, even the confessor. She learned what to do for the ones who wanted to hurt her and what to do for the ones who wanted her to hurt them. After letting an especially persuasive customer get her hopes up ten or twelve times, she learned to distrust and dislike them all equally, a democracy of loathing.
She’d learned a great many things at Cherry Girls.
The customer at the head of the line is finally waved forward by one of the somnolent tellers, and Lala’s heart accelerates. She feels the prickling of sweat in her underarms. She hates hates hates this part of the game.
When she first fled the northeast for Bangkok, with the police after her for almost killing her father, and owning nothing but the scraps on her back, she let a man take her in and give her a place to sleep in one corner of a filthy, leaking, plastic-sheeted plywood shack in the poorest part of Klong Toey, where any food left unattended for more than two minutes simply disappeared beneath a squabble of rats. After he forced himself on her three times (he was her first, if you didn’t count her father’s fumblings) and her novelty wore off, the man told her she’d have to pay her way by working the sidewalks of Sukhumvit, but she stood out because of her age. Worse, because she hadn’t gotten herself an in with the cops, she was run off repeatedly and was taken twice to a station where policemen put her in a cell and took turns with her for several bruising days. Finally she let the only cop who’d ever seemed friendly buy her coffee, and he told her about a place she could work where they wanted young girls and the police wouldn’t bother her.
So she went with him to a building with a neon sign that said cherry girls massage. Watching him pocket the fee the mama-san gave him without offering a baht of it to her, she felt a dull ache in her heart, its edges ringed by a fine, bright flicker of fury. He was the only person in Bangkok who had been polite to her. He left without looking back.
It had been almost six in the evening when he took her there. By the time they closed the doors at 3 a.m., she felt as scooped out as a melon. She’d had seven customers. She was seventeen years old.
Once again the line is at a dead stop. The bank is so silent it could be underwater. For the past year, she’s been telling herself it’s time to quit. Their luck can’t last forever. It’s time to tell Kang that she’s close to quitting. It would be a good idea, she thinks, to
be well armed for the conversation. To take her mind off the bank, she begins to organize her approach.
Even before Cherry Girls, her first few months in Bangkok had taught her quite a bit. When she arrived, like many young people, she had assumed that the sexes were much more similar than they actually are. But the men she met in the city taught her otherwise. The city was rich in lesson opportunities. She learned one lesson from the slum dweller who welcomed her to the city by raping her and turning her out as a street whore. She learned others from the few she snagged on the sidewalk before the cops got her; some of them hated her the moment they were finished with her, and others found it amusing to throw her out without paying.
She learned an enormous amount in the police station, from the cops who lined up to take her in the cells. They competed to mount her differently, in front of one another and the prisoners in the other cells. They called out encouragement to one another, entering her through all the available orifices, applauding or laughing when one of them did something novel. When they thought she was too dirty even to rape, they hosed her off right there in the cell. It had been an intense learning experience.
An icy stab of panic snaps her into the present. Where’s the check? She finds it folded neatly in the Vuitton purse and glances reflexively at her Rolex, a real one. Bank tellers can spot fakes more quickly than customs agents. A quick glimpse of the real thing works wonders on a teller’s attitude.
She realizes she’s shifting from foot to foot and doesn’t want it to be seen as anxiety, so she checks the watch again, and this time she actually reads the time. Getting late. This is the main thing she was worried about, the reason she has risked changing her routine. She always makes the two stops in the same order: ATM and then bank. The ATM is a low-risk warm-up, getting her ready for the bank. But it had been late by the time she got away from the current patient, and her bus couldn’t move in the traffic, so she’d broken the rule, gone to the bank first and let the ATM wait. Standing here in this eternal line, she regrets it.
She hasn’t done it in this order before. Doing things in order is the safest way to stay alive.
As she came to realize—even before she wound up at Cherry Girls—how little of her life she could control, she developed a secret magic to avert disaster. Its fundamental tactic was to remember a situation in which things had worked out well and then duplicate her conduct as closely as possible, every time the situation arose. By now she does it without thinking about it, unless, as now, she’s forced to deviate. She sits in the same chair for dinner every night, goes around the block in the same direction, has one sip of liquid before she eats. In a thousand little ways, she follows scripts only she knows, follows them every time, and they work. Look at her: All these years and she’s still playing the game.
But. She should have gone to the ATM first. The perspiration beneath her arms runs down her sides. Sweat has popped into being at her hairline, hidden for the moment beneath the wig. She’d mop it, but she might knock the wig crooked, and then she’d be remembered.
In one way Cherry Girls was a survival course. As much as she’d disliked her customers there, she was forced to compete with the girls who in other circumstances she would have tried to befriend. The massage parlor felt like a dinner for twenty where there was only enough food for ten. She had to keep her own customers and, beyond that, steal some away from the other women. This meant that for the first time she had to focus on the customers as individuals, even when she was accommodating eight or nine a night. If she wanted them to come back to her, she couldn’t just see them as dicks with legs. They sensed it when a girl did that, and they wanted to feel special, even the ones with the most repulsive demands. She saw how many men lit up when their girl of choice greeted them by name, but most of her customers were farang, and all foreign names sounded the same to her, so she assigned each of them the name of an animal he somehow resembled. She had a whole menagerie: a water buffalo, several breeds of dog, a sheep, a couple of fish, a snake, many kinds of birds, even some insects. She ran through most of the animals that a farm girl is familiar with, plus a few exotics, such as a unicorn—a guy who always entered the room visibly ready to go—and one of those dinosaurs with the huge body and the tiny head. (Years later, seeing a Disney cartoon in which a platoon of little animals pitched in to help the heroine do her chores, she had laughed out loud.)
So she didn’t have names, but she had a way to tell them apart, and she had dates. On a calendar over the bed, she wrote the Thai word for each animal who showed up on that day, and when he came back, she could smile and say, “I get lonely. I don’t see you for eight day.” Those customers tipped more, but that didn’t make them smell any better, weigh any less, or want to do less humiliating things.
The big room flickers and brightens, and Lala realizes that the bank has turned on its fluorescents because the day outside is beginning to dim. So she was right about one thing: If she’d gone to the ATM first and then walked here, the bank might have been closed when she arrived. The realization doesn’t relax her.
Cherry Girls was run like a factory: men in, men out, no drama, no shouting, no unsatisfied customers. Eat when it was possible, go hungry when it wasn’t. To keep the girls acting cheerful and innocent, the mama-san had hired three muscles. As Lala would later learn, all houses had muscles, who were generally kept out of sight until needed. The girls talked about the muscles. Two of the muscles could be won over, for a time anyway, with a quick one on a slow afternoon, but the third, a silent, one-eyed giant who was the biggest man Lala had ever seen, demonstrated no interest in the girls. He looked at them, if at all, as though they were furniture that might eventually need moving.
The giant gave her one of the worst frights of her life late one night when a regular customer, the stork, was leaving. She’d followed him into the hallway, telling him to come back soon because she’d miss him, and as soon as he’d disappeared around the corner, she spit on the carpet. Then she did it three more times. When she turned to go back to her room, the giant was standing there, his right eye gleaming in the fluorescents, the socket of the left pink and dusty-looking. For a moment she thought her heart would stop, but he just shook his head slowly and passed her by, pausing to grind her spit into the rug with the sole of his shoe. Just before he followed the customer around the corner, he turned back to look at her again, for a long, breath-holding moment.
After three years of working seven days and nights each week at Cherry Girls, she’d been told she was through, she was too old. So she’d asked the mama-san for the portion of her earnings they’d told her they were banking for her and was told that her room and board had eaten most of that up and there wasn’t cash on hand to pay her the remainder. When she said she’d wait until they had the cash, the mama-san called the big one, and the giant had picked her up, thrown her over his shoulder like a sack of rice, and carried her to the tiny room she worked and slept in. He’d tapped his watch and held up five fingers to tell her how many minutes she had to get everything she owned, and then he went away. She sat on the bed, feeling like someone who had opened her front door only to discover that the world had disappeared. She’d hated Cherry Girls, but at least in there she knew what to expect. She’d barely been outside since the cop sold her to the mama-san. She didn’t even know where in Bangkok she was. When the giant came back in, carrying an empty brown supermarket bag, he found her exactly where he’d left her. He opened the bag on the bed, right beside her, and started picking things up. He’d hold something up and point at her, meaning, Yours? If she said yes, he’d drop it in. When the room was empty, he sat beside her, so close she thought he was going to take her by force since she no longer officially worked there. Instead he put his mouth to her ear and said, in a whisper so ragged it might have been dragged over a sidewalk for miles, “You sure all this is yours? Mama’s going to check.” She’d closed her eyes for a moment to dispel the mixture of anger and panic that owned
her from head to foot. When she opened them again, she took out two blouses she’d borrowed from another girl and put them on the bed. Only then did she begin to cry.
The tears were mostly fear and frustration, but the giant misunderstood. “Won’t do you any good,” he whispered. The voice was awful. “Got any money?”
“No.” She could barely look at him. The sight of the empty eye socket made the room spin.
“Too bad,” he said. He rifled through the bag, taking things out one by one and holding them up again, waiting for her to nod or shake her head. When he was through, he handed her the bag, leaned so close that his lips brushed her ear, and said, in that gargling whisper, “I’ll tell Mama I double-checked. Go out and turn left. Walk to Soi Seven and turn there. Go to the Heart Clinic. Tell them Kang sent you.”
It was the longest speech she’d ever heard him make. Since she had no alternative plan, she did as he suggested, and when she unpacked her things in the Heart Clinic, where all the girls were dressed as nurses, she found a five-hundred-baht bill folded into a tight, tiny square at the bottom of the bag.
Eight months later everything had changed.
She’s been in the bank more than twenty minutes, but she’s finally getting a hello from a teller. It’s the same one who waited on her the last time she was in this bank, a sallow young woman who looks infinitely pregnant, with circles beneath her eyes that are so dark they could have been photocopies. Lala hoped for any other teller in the bank, but so far there’s no flicker of recognition. Lala looks nothing like the woman the teller waited on nine or ten days ago.
“Hot out,” Lala says, putting the Vuitton bag up on the counter in plain sight and rummaging needlessly through it. She wants to display both the bag and the Rolex, show the teller a wealthy woman who’s disorganized, unprepared, who might need a little help. After they’d been together a few months, Kang had told her she “radiated distance” and that she needed to learn to make people feel closer, make them feel, at the very least, that she knew they were there.
Fools' River Page 17