“Unusual for this time of year,” the teller says politely.
“Don’t know why I carry all this stuff,” Lala says, with just a touch of cherry girl: wide-eyed and unequal to the challenge of the moment.
“It’s a beautiful purse,” the teller says. She places her left hand on her stomach as though the child has just kicked. “It wouldn’t look so nice if it were empty.”
“That’s what I’ll tell my husband,” Lala says. “He’s at me all the time, as though I’m packed for a week’s vacation, but he bought me the bag. I’ll say, ‘It needs to be full to look its best.’” She pulls out the check. “Finally.”
“Straight deposit?” The teller glances at the check as Lala slips it beneath the glass.
“No, I’m cashing it. Let me get my ID.”
“Take your time,” the teller says, studying the check. “I need a moment.” She turns away.
Lala doesn’t lift her face, which is tilted downward so she can continue to rummage through the bag, but her eyes follow the teller, who angles across the space behind the customer stations and stops in front of a desk. Behind the desk sits a heavy man with three chins, fat lips, and hair combed forward like a Roman emperor’s, a pathetic attempt to mask a receding hairline. He’s on the phone. As Lala’s heart plays a tiny timpani in her ears, he holds up a finger—wait—without glancing at the teller. Even through her fear, Lala feels a flare of loathing erupt in her heart. Officious prick. She reduces her fear by envisioning him strapped naked to the bed as she makes him up to look like a female pig, attaching little pink suction cups on his chest like nipples, using a whole tube of lipstick on those fat, wet, pendulous lips. With a tape of squealing pigs on the sound system and more serious indignities to come. Keeping her face empty, she brings out the Coach wallet with the excellent driver’s license, the name and the number valid but not hers, and waits for the pig to give the teller a moment of his precious fucking time.
She hates men like this one. This is the kind of man, self-important and probably self-loathing, who drips sweat like a faucet when he fucks, who likes to slap cherry girls around, either because they’re “starfish” who, under the pretense of being innocently unfamiliar with the act of love, just lie there or because they simulate passion badly, with the empty overreaching of bad acting. This is the kind of man she had the hardest time handling until the day she finally came up with a little two-person play in which a powerful and irresistible man gradually and unexpectedly awakens passion in a frightened girl, a girl who has no idea what is happening to her and who in the end weeps with gratitude. And if this man were the customer, the first thing he’d do after he had his pitiful little spasm would be to go to the small mirror on the wall, congratulate his reflection, and comb his hair forward with his fingers.
He’d probably stiff her on the tip.
He hangs up the phone and takes the check from the teller’s outstretched hand without meeting her eyes. He looks at it and turns it over. Lala’s heart rate doubles.
The fat-lipped man snaps a question. The teller shakes her head, saying something, but he cuts her off with an upraised hand and thrusts the check at her. The teller wheels away, back toward Lala, and the fat-lipped man gets up grudgingly and follows, but not closely. When the teller is back at the window, he stops about two meters away.
“Is there a problem?” Lala can’t believe how steady her voice is. What’s waiting on the other side of this moment, if it goes wrong, is the death penalty.
“No, no, it’s just over my limit, that’s all. That’s your identification?”
“It is.” Trying to look amused at the situation, she holds the driver’s license up to her face to demonstrate that it’s her photo in the corner. Her knees are shaking but her hand is motionless. She slides the license under the pane of glass. The teller looks down at it and up at her, then picks it up and turns toward the fat-lipped man as though inviting him to look at it, but he shakes his head, dismisses her with the back of his hand, and waddles toward his desk, his pants caught in the crack of his ass, as Lala thinks how much better he’d look with a cast on his leg.
Being a nurse was much better than being a cherry girl.
Where cherry girls were damp and submissive, nurses were dry, brisk, and in charge. The Heart Clinic looked inoffensive enough from the outside—the sign was a giant pink neon heart with a tidy little Band-Aid on it—but inside, it pandered to a spectrum of specialties sorted by room, with the less exotic practices—ranging from relatively innocent variations on playing doctor to ultrahygienic hand jobs—in the front rooms. The rooms farther from the entrance hosted more complicated costume play with clearly defined roles and high-priced pain. In the smaller, darker, and much more expensive rooms at the back, behind two concealed doors, were immobilization and long-term stays for the wealthy and the warped. Here Lala learned to administer medications via IV bags, how much fentanyl was usually safe for someone who’d built up a tolerance, how to create an expert bandage on an unharmed arm, how to counterweight a traction device, how to put a functional cast on a leg.
She enjoyed the work. It suited her. She was inherently tidy and strong-willed, and her stay in Bangkok had done nothing but intensify the loathing for men that was her father’s only lasting gift. She liked having them immobile and dependent on her, liked the apprehensive expressions they wore when she came into the room with her mask on, especially after she started putting her lipstick on the outside of the mask rather than on her lips. She liked the fact that they had to call her “Nurse,” liked it as they tried to see how big a dose she was injecting into the IV bag, and most of all they liked the fact that it was agreed in advance that she, and not they, decided when the game ended. Sure, they had a “safe word,” but the ones who used it too soon were, generally speaking, not encouraged to return unless they tipped very well, so over time a kind of evolutionary mechanism weeded out the weak and moved the general customer population toward the deadly serious end of the long, ever-darkening line that connects love and pain.
Then Kang had shown up and seized control of the business in a short and remarkably bloody coup that included negotiating a sign-off from the cops. A few months later, he’d taken her to the small apartment building he’d purchased beside the klong—in which he occupied the only unit in use—and, in careful stages, told her the idea that had made them both rich.
With the bank’s money stowed safely in her purse, she steps out onto the hot, stinking sidewalk again, wondering whether she’s imagining the fat-lipped man’s eyes on her back. She literally has to shrug off the impulse to turn and look. She modifies the aborted movement into a fluff of her wig where it falls onto her back, a piece of mime that’s expressive of the heat. Then she looks at her watch again, just to be doing something, and turns right.
It’s nearly six. The day is dimming, and the sidewalk is jammed. Lala can smell the people, their dirty hair and underarms. Three hairy-legged foreign men in shorts jostle past her, a German, maybe, and two Arabs, towing behind them a triangular wake of body odor.
He might have been on the phone, the fat-lipped man, by the time she stepped outside. Not going to the ATM first is feeling more and more like a serious mistake; the bank was mostly empty by the time she left, and if she’d gone to the ATM first, she wouldn’t have had to wait in line for a teller, might have gotten a different teller with a higher limit, might not have had to . . .
Stop it, she tells herself. It’s over. There’s just the ATM to go, and that’s easy. Then she can go home, get this stuff off, and take a long shower.
Why did the teller need approval? The last check was for a little more, and there hadn’t been a problem.
She passes two big banks with a scattering of ATMs in front, gleaming like big, bright, hard candies in the spotlights that have just snapped on to illuminate the area. The ATMs she uses in this part of Bangkok are five long blocks farther off. It will be da
rk when she gets there. Any of these machines would probably do, but there will be no more changes to the routine.
So she’s relieved when she sees the ATMs, sees that no one is standing at the one she needs. She walks past it, her head still but her eyes everywhere, and then pauses in midstep, clearly someone who’s just remembered something, and turns and goes back to the ATM, shaking her head at her own forgetfulness. She unzips the purse with her right hand, always her right hand, and takes out the orange plastic card that says herbert dell on it. She looks right and then left—she always does it, even though she knows it’s a signal that she’s about to make a withdrawal and is checking her surroundings. She did it without thinking the first few times, and now it’s an inescapable part of the script, and anyway, she pities the street thief who would try to take her purse. The card, now in her left hand, slips into the slot easily, as though it’s been allowed to go home at last, and Lala hits withdrawal, keys in 60,000 baht, and enters Dell’s security code. The machine whirs a moment and then makes a noise she hasn’t heard before, and the card slides partway out, as though the machine is sticking its tongue out at her.
The screen says declined.
There’s a roar in her ears, her stomach is suddenly in knots, and she feels sweat on her forehead. She pushes it all aside and repeats the entire sequence. Maybe she got the code wrong, maybe she inverted—
declined.
She doesn’t look around to see whether anyone is watching. She stands there for a slow count of four, breathing evenly to dissipate the cold ball of panic in her gut, and then reaches down and mimes taking cash out of the slot and retrieving the card. Bending to put the card and the imaginary banknotes into her purse, she catches a whiff of her own breath, and it’s sour with fear.
When she’s all the way around the corner and sure no one is watching her, she pulls her phone out of her purse and holds down one key. When Kang picks up—without a spoken greeting, as usual—she says, “We have to get rid of him. Tonight.” She doesn’t expect an answer, whether he agrees or not, but she waits anyway. After a few seconds, he disconnects.
Part Three
THE RAPIDS
21
Yes, I Not Know
Arthit has booked Rafferty, under the not-very-likely name Richard Milton, into a fancy room at the Landmark on Sukhumvit, up one long block—although not quite long enough for Rafferty—from the three-story stack of skin emporiums on Soi Nana. He’s heading down the hallway toward the front door of Edward’s house, dialing Rose for the fourth or fifth time, when an electronic cricket chirps somewhere in front of him. He stops abruptly at the sound, and Rose’s voice mail picks up his call as Clemente, toting the box of Edward’s father’s things she’d declined to let either him or Edward carry, bumps into his back and says, “Excuse me.”
Edward, who is ushering them out, steps around him and pushes a button beside the door. Above the button a small and very bright screen pops to life, and Rafferty sees Miaow, looking even shorter when seen from above. Behind her is a slight girl wearing a big floppy hat, a loose, familiar-looking denim dress, and a huge, movie-star-size pair of sunglasses.
“Hey there,” Edward says, apparently into a microphone. He pushes the release button, and there’s a buzz. Rafferty watches Miaow and her shrouded companion come through it as he disconnects from Rose’s voice mail without leaving another message. He feels a little squiggle of unease chase itself in figure eights in his gut—this is an awfully long lunch; what if something went wrong?—but he pushes it away and steps aside as Edward pulls the front door open for Miaow and her friend. Miaow’s mouth narrows, not in a smile, as she sees him.
“What are you—” she says, as he says, “Have you heard from your—” but then he recognizes her companion and says, “What in the world happened to you?”
“Man,” Lutanh says, miming hitting herself. “Him . . . he . . . he . . . boxing me.”
“A man did this?” Clemente says. She drops the box where she’s standing, and Lutanh jumps straight up at the sound. “Take off the glasses.”
Lutanh shakes her head. “Ugly too much.”
“Take them off.” Clemente’s tone does not invite argument, and Lutanh very carefully eases the glasses from her face. Edward draws a quick breath, and her eyes dart to him and then away. Her eyelids are a mottled purple and pink, swollen almost shut, and her nose is thickened and lopsided, knocked about fifteen percent off vertical so it now drifts to the left as it approaches her split upper lip.
Clemente steps around the box to get a closer look “Where did this happen?” She’s biting the words off. The golden eyes glow like roadside reflectors. “Do you know who—”
“Happen in ho—”
“On the street,” Miaow says over her. “Near Silom. Big guy. Farang.”
“When?”
“This morning,” Miaow says, all but shoving Lutanh to shut her up.
Clemente gives Miaow a long glance and leans toward Lutanh. “Do you know who—”
Lutanh says, “Yes,” and over her Miaow says, “No,” and Lutanh says, “Yes, I not know who he is.”
“Why would he hit you?” Clemente says.
“Him want . . .” She falters, grabs a deep breath, and ventures, “My money?”
Clemente turns to Rafferty and shrugs a sort of irritated hopelessness.
“We can talk about all this later,” he says. “Lutanh, have you used any ice? Do you have any open cuts?”
“No,” Lutanh says, looking at Miaow. When no prompt is forthcoming, she says, “Yes. Have.” She points to her lips. “Here.” Then she indicates her right elbow and her left knee, both of which are covered, and says, “Have here, too.”
Clemente says to Lutanh, “If you know who he is—”
“Not know,” Lutanh says, and she sounds like she’s on the verge of tears.
“I’ll get some ice,” Edward says.
Miaow says, “Good idea. Lutanh, go with him. Maybe he can . . . you know, do something about the swelling. Maybe some antiseptic for the scrapes.”
“Okeydoke,” Lutanh says. “Where going, Edwudd?”
“Kitchen,” Edward says, turning to lead her. “We have a refrigerator that makes ice twenty-four hours a day. It’s absolutely impossible to run out of ice.” Lutanh says something in reply, but they’re out of earshot.
Rafferty says, “Your dress looks good on her. So does Rose’s hat.”
“I thought they were cute,” Miaow says. “And, look, she’s almost the same size—”
“So you took her home before you came here.”
“Well, her . . . um, her clothes were all bloody, and she—”
“Was your mother there?”
“Mom?” Miaow looks surprised. “No. She went out to lunch.”
“Have you heard from her?”
“I haven’t checked my phone, but—”
“Check it.”
“Yes, sir. Hang on.”
Clemente says, “Those injuries did not happen this morning.”
“No,” Miaow says, lowering her voice, her fingers a blur on the phone. “Last night, but don’t tell Edward.” She looks at the screen. “No calls.”
“It’s been too long,” Rafferty says, glancing at his watch.
“She’s with her friends,” Miaow says, “and she never gets out of the apartment.”
“If it happened last night—” Clemente says, but Miaow is shushing her, so she lowers her voice. “If it happened last night, what else is she, or the two of you, lying about?”
“I don’t think we actually told you any—”
“You didn’t tell us anything.” Clemente leans forward, a movement that manages to be simultaneously intimate and aggressive. “What’s the big secret?”
Miaow says, in a half whisper, “He doesn’t know she works in a bar.”
&n
bsp; “He?”
She lifts her chin in the direction that Edward took.
Clemente says, “This is about teenage love?”
Rafferty says, “Why did you bring her here?”
Miaow gives him the wide eyes that mean, Dumb question. “She can’t stay with us. You know . . . Mom. And she can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“The cops—” She looks at Clemente and puts her fingertips over her mouth.
“Did she steal something?” Clemente demands. She slides the box up against the wall with her foot. “Did she injure him?”
“Oh, no,” Miaow says, “she just sat there and let this big bag of shit beat her up. What do you think she did? But she’s a bar worker and he’s a farang, and guess who’ll go to jail?”
Clemente says, “How badly did she hurt him?”
“Stabbed him in the knee.”
“The knee?”
“She was dangling upside down, okay? He’d punched her in the face and knocked her down, and then he picked her up by her belt and she grabbed a steak knife—”
“Lower your voice,” Rafferty says.
“Do you really think,” Miaow says to Clemente in a fierce whisper, “that she assaulted a guy who weighs like a hundred kilos? Look at her, she’s a blade of grass.”
“So what you’re saying, or at least what you would be saying if you could calm down,” Clemente says, “is that a customer took her to his hotel to beat her up.”
Miaow eyes her for a moment. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Does she remember what hotel? His room number?”
“Of course she does.”
“Well, then,” Clemente says, and her throat sounds tight. “Maybe a personal call is in order.”
“He’s got her wings,” Miaow says to Rafferty.
“Her wings?”
Miaow looks at the carpet. “Never mind,” she says. “It’s not important.”
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