“Found it,” she says. “At least I think I did. It says ‘Fon’ anyway.”
“In what?”
“Her phone book, where did you think?”
“I didn’t even know she had one.”
“It’s really a calendar book. She puts phone numbers in the back.”
“Right. I think I remember—” He finds he’s once again surged up against the back of the front seat, so he slides to the rear, thinking, It’s not productive to be this keyed up.
“You might not have paid attention to this,” Miaow says, as though he weren’t talking, “but she doesn’t have a lot of friends these days.”
It hits him like a splash of cold water. “She doesn’t?”
“As I was looking through the book? I saw all these names, people she never mentions anymore. It surprised me. It made me kind of sad. So I guess I wasn’t paying attention either. And, you know, she went to meet Fon and maybe one or two other girls from the bar days, and it seems like that’s all she’s got left.”
“Got it,” he says. “Oh, boy.”
“I felt the same way,” Miaow says, “but then I thought about it, and you know? If it’s true, she chose it—I mean, she chose us—it’s not like you built a wall around her or kept her on a leash or anything.”
“Still makes me sad.”
His daughter says nothing. The silence stretches just a little too long.
“She’ll be okay,” he says, pumping it full of assurance.
“I know. She’s strong.”
“She is.” This time he can’t think of anything reassuring, so he says, “Well, thanks. Talk to you later,” and rings off. The moment he does it, he thinks, I didn’t get the—and the phone rings.
“You didn’t get the number,” Miaow says. She starts to laugh but then doesn’t. “Are you ready?”
“I was just testing you,” he says, fumbling with his pen. A moment later he says, “Go,” and she reads the number.
Then he and Miaow share another discouraging moment of silence until she says, “Bye.”
Fon’s phone just rings. No pickup, no voice mail. He dials it again and gets the same nothing, so he calls Rose, for perhaps the twentieth time since he left the apartment that morning. When her voice mail kicks in, he just says, “Me. Getting worried,” and hangs up.
He’s practically in the front seat again.
Suddenly he can’t stand the idea of going to the Landmark, dealing with minutiae. Eating something when he’s actually not all that hungry; he’s got a little layer of fat around his middle, he can live on that. He calls Miaow again.
“What?” she says. “Did you hear anything?”
“No. No answer. Listen, go get your mom’s calendar book.” The cab eases to a stop, and Rafferty looks up to see they’ve pulled up to the Landmark, so he says to the driver, “Keep going.”
The driver says, “Where?”
“I don’t care. Around the block, just go.” The driver pulls away from the curb, and Miaow says, “Got it.”
“Okay. Read it. The names, I mean.”
“Out loud?”
“If I wanted you to read it silently, I wouldn’t be tying up my phone.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, and she begins to read, flatly, just getting through them. Rose has apparently written many of the names at full length, including some interminable last names, and to Rafferty’s ears it’s a speeding freight train of virtually meaningless syllables.
“It’s just a list,” he says. “You could be reciting the alphabet. Even a name I know might slide past me.” It gives him an idea. “Make it interesting, give me some variety.”
“Like how?”
“Like . . .” He thinks about it for a moment. “Okay, you read those lines in Pygmalion last night, right?”
“Yeah.” She sounds cautious, like he might be setting a trap.
“Well, when you do the accent in the play, because you’re going to get the part, what you’re probably going to do is make the accent thick at the beginning to startle the audience and to demonstrate how wide the gulf is between the way Eliza talks and the way Henry Higgins does, and then you’re going to thin it out some so the audience doesn’t have to work so hard. Following me?”
“Don’t ask me if I’m following you when you haven’t said anything hard to understand. But yeah, that’s what I’d do.”
“When it’s thick, the accent, I mean, you’re going to have to visualize what you’re saying. Have you got the script there?”
“Sure. That’s what I’m doing, looking at—”
“Read it.”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It does. Read it. Start with her third line.”
“Sure, he says read it. Hold on a second. Okay, here goes: ‘Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin.’” She’s sounded out every syllable with exactly the same emphasis as the ones that preceded and followed it.
“That’s what your mom’s phone book sounded like to me when you read it. Now, look, here’s what’s happened. Eliza, she’s selling flowers on the street because she’s so poor, but they’re rich and they speak with . . . umm, rich accents, and the son, Freddy—”
“That’s the part Edward wants.”
“Freddy has just stepped all over her flowers—sorry, your flowers, without saying he’s sorry, without even looking down at you, and he’s run off to get a cab. How do you think Eliza feels?”
“I know exactly how she feels,” Miaow says. “I had rich people practically poop on me all the time.”
“Well, what Eliza is saying is, ‘Oh, he’s your son, is he? Well, if you’d done your duty by him as a mother should, he’d know better than to spoil a poor girl’s flowers, then run away without paying.”
He listens to nothing for a long moment, and then Miaow says, “Oh.”
“So when you’ve got the accent and you’re doing it, you’ll see all of that in your mind as you say it, and it’ll be twice as clear to the audience what you mean.”
She reads the lines again. It’s not cockney, but it’s more intelligible.
“We’ll work on the accent later. For now read me the names in your mother’s address book, more slowly, and try to visualize the ones you know, or make up a picture for the ones you don’t. Think of it as an exercise.”
“Okay, here goes.” She sounds a little stilted at first, but then she puts it together, and he can hear the names begin to represent individuals, and he knows some of them. He writes one down and tells her to stop and give him the number.
“That’s Peachy,” Miaow says. “They haven’t seen each other in months. Not since she told Peachy she was pregnant.”
“They were close, they were business partners, maybe they’ve talked. What’s the number?”
As she reads on, he can see some of the people who go with the names; he’s known some of them almost as long as he’s known Rose, although he’s seen them infrequently: Lek, Ning, Noi, Coke, Jah, Kai, Champagne, Marilyn, Nit, and half a dozen others, the friends she made dancing in the bars. Mrs. Pongsiri, the older woman who lives down the hall. Anna, Arthit’s current companion, plus eight or ten more.
“That’s it?” he says.
“And she doesn’t even talk about these lately,” Miaow says.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll call around.”
“She’s with Fon,” Miaow says, as though it ends the discussion.
“Can you think of anything else I can do?” He looks up to find that they’re stopped in traffic and that half a block or so in front of them, on their left, are the neon-lit hordes of Nana Plaza, so either traffic has been terrible and they’ve barely moved at all or they’ve already gone around the block once and are into their second cir
cuit. “But Fon’s not the only one,” he says. “Maybe there was a group of them, maybe they’re still together and one of them—Lek or Noi or someone—has her phone with her, who the hell knows? What time is it?”
“Look at your watch.”
“I’m in the back of a cab, and it’s dark, and don’t tell me to look at my phone because I’m talking to you on it.”
“Wow,” she says. “Nine-forty already.”
He gets a beep on his phone and looks at the screen. It says blocked.
“I gotta go,” he says, punching the buttons.
A man’s voice, a tight, nervous voice that snips off the syllables as though he’s saving part of them for future use, says, “Mr. Rafferty?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“You asked someone to have me call you,” the man says. “My name is Larry Finch.”
26
Stooo-art
Larry Finch is still talking, but a horn is blaring behind Rafferty’s cab, probably someone too eager to get into a Nana bar to wait and too lazy to walk. Rafferty says, “Hang on a second, Mr. Finch. Don’t go away.” To the driver he says, “Please turn into the Nana parking lot.”
“You want go Nana Hotel?”
“Not really,” Rafferty says, “but what the hell.” He pulls out a hundred-baht note; the meter says sixty-three, so he hands it over the back of the seat and says, “Thanks,” and gets out of the car. Into the phone he says, “You still there, Mr. Finch?”
“I am.”
“Can I have your number, in case I lose you?”
“No.”
“But if we get cut off—”
“If we get cut off, it’ll be because I hang up. I don’t know much about cell phones, sonny, but I know some people can figure out where you are when you’re on one.”
“That’s fine,” Rafferty say. “Just give me a minute, because I need to get someplace where I can hear you.”
As Rafferty goes into the lobby, one of the Nana’s ancient bellmen snaps awake long enough to stand up, looking around for Rafferty’s luggage. Rafferty waves him off and hoists a thumb to the left, the direction of the coffee shop, and the bellman sighs and sits down again. It’s a big, cavernous, run-down lobby, just shading into dinginess. In a cluster of armchairs at the far end sit a bunch of men, possibly the same gaggle of old guys who were there last time Poke was in the hotel, maybe two years ago. He knows that some of these men have arranged to live here until they die.
In the empty coffee shop, he heads for a seat at the window that serves as a wall, unnoticed by the waitresses, who are lolling around the cash register and telling jokes. On the other side of the plate glass, the parking-lot girls are already out in force, flagging down the lonely, the miserly, and the impossible to satisfy as they head back, solo, from the bars to their rooms. Three more of the hotel old-timers cluster at their usual outdoor table, their backs to the automatic sliding door so they can watch the unchanging show. As Rafferty sits down, the man nearest the door, who is in a wheelchair, backs it up a few inches and activates the door, which obediently slides open for no one, admitting an unwelcome puff of hot air.
“Okay, this is better,” Rafferty says. “And you’re right, I don’t need to know where you are.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “What do you need?”
“Well, Campeau said—”
“You mean Bob?”
“Yes, Bob. He said you’d had some trouble here and then disappeared.”
“And I’m going to stay disappeared,” Finch says. “Why does this matter to you?”
“Didn’t Bob—”
“I’m asking you.”
“A man has been missing for nearly two weeks now. He’s got a lot in common with a bunch of other men who also disappeared and then turned up dead.”
“He’s a punter,” Finch says bluntly. He doesn’t make it sound like a compliment.
“And he’s got a teenage son who’s a friend of my daughter’s, and—”
“Part-Thai daughter? Got a Thai mother?”
The automatic door slides closed again. Instantly, on the other side of the window, the man in the wheelchair rolls back, just enough to reopen the door. Rafferty can’t see any reason to begin a conversation about Miaow’s being adopted, so he says, “Yes.”
“You’ve got what I wanted, you son of a bitch,” Larry Finch says. “When I first got there, I wanted to get married and have kids, fifty-fifty kids. They’re so beautiful. How old is your daughter?”
“Fourteen,” Rafferty says, although no one knows for sure.
“Smart?”
“Smarter than I am.”
“And the boy? The son of the guy who’s disappeared? Is he a half-and-half?”
“No, he’s American. His father came here to live, and his American wife sort of sent the kid to him by express mail. So if his father doesn’t come back—”
“He won’t,” Finch says. “Not unless he was born with a four-leaf clover up his butt.”
“Well, that’s why I’m bothering you. We’re going to try to lend him a hand. I’m hoping you can give us something that’ll help us find him.”
“Who’s ‘us’?”
“I’m working with a couple of cops.”
“Uh-uh,” Finch says. “Goodbye.” He disconnects.
Rafferty sits there, staring at his phone. Automatically tries to return the call but gets blocked again. He shakes the phone, as if that’ll do any good, and then drops it onto the table as a wave of weariness sweeps over him, a tangled knot of exhaustion: worry about Rose, worry about what will happen to Edward, frustration at the idiocy of his raising Edward’s hopes by thinking he could help when time is so clearly running out. He closes his eyes and rests his face in his hands, and after a long moment of something close to despair, intense enough to feel as though it might be permanent, a jolt of anger snaps him upright and he grabs the phone.
When Toots says, “Leon and Toot’s Bar,” he says, “It’s Poke. I need to talk to Campeau.”
“In toilet.”
“When he comes out, give him the phone.”
As he waits, the sliding door opens again. The fidgety guy in the wheelchair has been joined by a couple more male friends wearing the many-pocketed photographer’s vests, mail-order linen shirts, and cargo shorts that make up the informal uniform of longtime expats, an outfit that always suggests to him that they’re anticipating the return of the tropical swamp that’s pressed beneath the weight of Bangkok. Standing in front of the table, facing in through the glass and obviously just killing time, are two of the more mature parking-lot “girls,” women carrying too many pounds and too many years for the clothes they’re wearing but whose faces are lively and kind and even sympathetic. How can they look like that, he thinks, after all they’ve been through?
Campeau says, “So?”
“So your friend Larry Finch just hung up on me.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to you anyway. How’d you piss him off?”
“Where is he?”
“Nope,” Campeau says. “And I’m not nuts about your tone.”
“You met Edward. Did he seem like a nice kid to you?”
“As kids go.”
“Well, if his father lives through tonight, Bob, he’ll have outlasted everyone else these people abducted. He’s going to die very soon, if he hasn’t already.”
“He shouldn’ta wore white shoes. So how’d you piss Larry off?”
“I mentioned that I was working with some cops.”
“That’d do it,” Campeau says. “He said cops were in and out while those assholes were holding him.”
It feels to Rafferty like his heart has stopped. He sees Clemente, out there on her own, after going to three police stations solely to shove sticks into the beehive.
/>
“Nice of you to tell me.”
“We haven’t had much time to chat,” Campeau says. “You don’t come around so much these days.”
“Give me Larry Finch’s phone number.”
“No can do.” Rafferty can hear the satisfaction in Campeau’s tone. He’s never really forgiven Poke for marrying Rose, “taking her off the market,” as he once put it. Rafferty has always attributed the man’s anger to his obvious unhappiness—he’s someone whom life has let down so hard he got dented—but Rafferty is too pissed off to think about that.
“Listen to me. You can either give me the number or you can tell Finch that the cops I’m working with are on the right side, but they’ve got the same skills as the other ones, and for not too much money under the table they’ll locate him, and when they do, I’ll turn his address over to Lala. Make sure you mention Lala. And I’ll do that if he doesn’t call me back.”
“Third option,” Campeau says. “I tell you to go fuck yourself and then I have another drink.”
“If you like Larry Finch at all, you’ll do what I just said. How long—cops in Southeast Asian countries being as infinitely corruptible as they are—how long do you think it would take them to locate him in, what? Phnom Penh? Siem Reap? Maybe a couple of hours and a few hundred bucks? Just tell him. Help him out. Be a pal, for once in your goddamn miserable life. If he doesn’t want to help me, he can hang up again.”
He disconnects, thinking, That might not have been the right tone, but he’s so furious his throat feels like it’s closing up, and he knows he can’t control what he says when he’s that angry. Either Campeau will call Finch or he won’t. There’s nothing more he, Rafferty, can do about it now.
He watches the group on the other side of the window for a moment. The two older parking-lot women have been joined by a third, somewhat younger, with a long, clearly defined pirate’s scar down her right cheek. She’s wearing a thick mask of foundation makeup to conceal the scar, a sharp, embossed slash from cheekbone to jawline, as though someone had tried to cut her head in half. It’s a dull red, and despite the makeup just enough of the color has leaked through to go a slightly livid purple in the yellowish light of the parking lot. Did some customer give her that?
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