The thought of a knife reminds him of Lutanh, and that in turn reminds him of Clemente, and as much as he doesn’t want to tie up his phone, he calls her.
“Just thinking about you,” she says.
“It was mutual. I just learned that Larry Finch, the guy who got away, said that there were cops in and out of the place where he was held.”
“Not an enormous surprise. In fact—”
“So I was thinking about you, showing up at all those stations and—”
“In fact,” Clemente says over him, “I think I might have someone behind me.”
“Well, shit.”
“I’ve called Anand. I’m doing a kind of loop now, and there might or might not be a car with tinted windows back there. I’m going to keep looping until Anand calls to say he’s in the neighborhood and heavily armed, and I can pick him up.”
“Anand is a good guy.” Anand is the cop Clemente was dating last time Rafferty saw him, but this isn’t the time to ask whether they’re still valentines. “So why were you thinking of me?”
“Your little katoey. The guy who hurt her needs to be talked to. Kind of forcefully. And unofficially.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“She gave me the name of the hotel and his room number. Since there’s nothing I can do right now except try to dodge whoever’s behind me, I called a couple of times, but he’s not in.”
“And this concerns me because . . . ?”
“Because your daughter, who’s obviously nicer than you are even if she bends the truth once in a while—”
“She’s had a mixed history with cops.”
“Everyone has. But the point is, she helped the katoey, and she’s your daughter, and if I talk to the jerk, I thought maybe you’d like to be part of the conversation.”
“Sure, if there’s nothing I can accomplish about Edward’s father.”
“I think the katoey should be there, too.”
“Lutanh, her name is Lutanh. Let’s see what happens in the next hour or two.” He finds himself thinking it might actually be a good idea to get Lutanh out of Edward’s house. They’re both young, they’re both beautiful, Lutanh has an obvious case on Edward, and as Poke was just reminding himself—in another context—there’s no telling what people will do. He’d been unenthusiastic when Miaow announced the plan; now he thinks it’s a potentially terrible idea.
“Okay.” Clemente pauses. “There’s definitely someone back there.” She sounds pretty calm about it. “What it looks like is a police SUV.”
“Do you want me to call Anand? Or Arthit?”
“No, Anand’s on his way, and don’t bother the colonel. Well, I’d better pay attention to this.” She hangs up.
Rafferty says, “Be careful,” into a dead phone.
The woman with the scarred face has just poached a cigarette from the guy in the wheelchair, who lights it for her and then celebrates his generosity by wheeling back far enough to open the door again. A waitress, who’s apparently had more than enough of the sliding door, trots past Rafferty’s table, saying, “Moment,” as she passes. Within ten seconds she’s reseated the table so the guy in the wheelchair is on the left and the one nearest the door is on a stationary stool. She takes a step back, inadvertently opening the door again, and stands there, arms crossed in a no-nonsense elementary-school-teacher pose, making sure they’re not going to play musical chairs the moment her back is turned. Then she comes in again and smiles at Poke, who orders a pot of coffee, a Diet Coke, and a dish of crisp basil, pork, and chili—phet maak maak—very hot. He looks accusingly at his phone, willing it to ring, and then gets up, doing a little I go out, I come back pantomime to the cashier, who had looked over when she heard his chair legs squeak on the floor.
He’d almost forgotten how sweltering the evening is until the atmosphere in the parking lot, an oven-force mix of gasoline fumes, body odor, and makeup, punches him in the face. The guy in the wheelchair glares up at him, but he glares at everybody.
“Buy you all a drink?” Rafferty says.
“Let’s see,” one of the other guys says. He takes a little notebook out of one of the pockets in his photographer’s vest, opens it to a blank page, and says, “Whaddaya know? Today is open. Bier Sing.”
“Hold on,” Rafferty says, gesturing for the waitress. “This is important. You don’t want to trust my memory.”
“You buying for the ladies, too?” asks the man in the wheelchair. It’s a challenge. He sounds like he hopes he’s picking a fight.
“Sure,” Rafferty says, and the woman with the scar says, “I have friend.”
“She have many many friend,” one of the other women says. “They all thirsty.”
“Just you three,” he says. “When there are too many beautiful women around, I get dizzy.”
“Sweet mouth,” says the one with the scar.
“Have a seat,” says Mr. Notebook.
“That’s okay, I’ll stand,” Rafferty says. “I’m just bribing you. I’m looking for a few friends.”
“Who isn’t?” says the man in the wheelchair.
“These are specific guys. Any of you know Buddy Dell?
There’s a pause, and then Mr. Notebook says, “White shoes?”
“Exactly.”
“Sure, I know him. To say hello to anyway. He’s a friend of yours, you said?”
“Not a close friend.”
“Good, because he’s kind of a dickhead. Sorry, ladies.”
The woman with the scar makes big eyes and clamps her hands over her ears, and one of the other women laughs politely.
“So why you looking for him?” It’s the guy in the wheelchair.
“He’s missing,” Rafferty says. “His son is a friend of my daughter’s, and the kid is worried.”
“Good Samaritan,” says the guy in the wheelchair, not making it sound like praise.
“What about a guy named Stuart Dependahl?”
There’s a brief silence, and then the announcer in the open-air Hooters that stands between the Nana Hotel and Soi 4 shouts into a microphone, “Say ‘yee-haaaa!’” No one says “yee-haaaa!”
“Fucking asshole,” says the man in the wheelchair. “Not your friend, that clown in there. People get up on that windup bull, he tells everyone to say ‘yee-haaaa,’ and no one ever does.”
“I knew Stuart,” says one of the men in a vest. “Sad thing.”
“Yeah,” Rafferty says.
One of the women, the oldest of the three, says, “You say Stooo-art?”
“Yes.”
“Take many, many lady,” the woman says.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rafferty says.
“Same time,” the woman says. “Many lady same time. Bed too small, him sleep on floor.”
The other unscarred woman is nodding. “Big bed,” she says. She laughs. “Room cold, air-con too much. Five lady warm in bed, him cold on floor.”
“Stooo-art,” the one who first mentioned him says fondly. “Good heart.”
“They ever catch the guys who . . .” asks the guy with the notebook, letting the question peter out.
“No, they didn’t. What about—” Poke has to close his eyes to concentrate, and there it is: the name of the man whose family had squinted into the sun in that snapshot taken on the dock. “Hayden Williams.”
General headshaking, although the woman with the scar shoots him a brief, troubled look.
“Okay,” he says, giving up for the moment. “Thanks.”
“Thanks for the drink,” Mr. Notebook says.
“Let me ask one more,” Rafferty says, turning back. “A woman this time. Name is Lala.”
The response is total silence, but the scarred woman is looking at her feet. He says to her, “Do you—” but his phone rings, and once again it says blocked.
“Lala,” he says to all of them. “Hold that thought.”
To Larry Finch he says, as he goes back inside, “Let me tell you why you don’t have to worry about me.”
27
The Tug That Tells Her You’re Stuck
“Son of a bitch was bigger than Idaho,” Larry Finch is saying. The phone is on speaker, and Rafferty has the wrinkled copy of Pygmalion blank side up on the table, a pen in his right hand and a spoon in his left. In front of him, a glass of Diet Coke gets warm as the ice melts and a cup of coffee gets cold.
“What was his name?”
“No idea. I just thought of him as the monster. Biggest Thai I ever saw. There weren’t any introductions. Mostly it was me alone in that bed while they played the same fucking tape over and over again in the hall.”
“Tape of what?”
“Hospital shit. ‘Dr. Jones to surgery,’ that kind of shit. ‘Calling Dr. Kildare.’ And every now and then, they’d inject some kind of whoopee juice into my IV and I’d go somewhere in my head. Later, after I got away, I learned how many checks I’d written on my accounts here—I mean there, in Bangkok—and they’d maxed my cards.”
“How much did they get?”
“Forty-five, fifty thousand US.”
“How long did they have you?”
“Near as I can figure, six days. Might have been seven. It was hard to keep track.”
Rafferty stirs the cooling food around, trying to crowd a bunch of the little red chilies onto his spoon. “So to back up for a minute, you phoned Good Times. Why?”
“Whaddaya think? You been through it, too, probably. You been here awhile, you’ve done everything you can think of and a bunch of shit that never even occurred to you before you got here, and one night you remember this website, and it’s right there on the fucking front page, with the biggest link leading to the Bangkok area of the site. ‘Good Times,’ all in pink, and it’s got like five hundred customer reviews, and they’re almost all five stars. And they say things like, ‘Think you’ve done everything? Think again,’ shit like that.”
“Lot of reviews,” Rafferty says, just to keep him talking.
“They gamed it, I figure. Don’t know how I could have been such a sucker, but that’s what happens when you think with ol’ Johnnie instead of your head. They just jammed these fake reviews into the Bangkok part of the site, supposed to be like Amazon for sex. So you call, and it’s Lala, and you meet her, and . . . and it’s not like she’s the most beautiful girl in the world, right? But she knows how to use the old can opener, and while you’re still working on your first drink, you’re telling her things you’ve never told anyone, talking about things you want to do, and she’s looking at you like you’re wonderful, like all this pathetic crap you’re talking makes you a man of imagination and daring. And all the while, of course, she’s sitting dead center in her web waiting for the tug that tells her you’re stuck.”
“Did she ever send you a picture?”
“Sure, first time I called her, but don’t get all Sherlock about it, because they took my phone.”
Rafferty is thinking, Take another look at those laptops, but what he says is, “How did it work?” He signals a waitress, points at his Diet Coke glass, which is mostly ice water. The chilies are hotter than usual. Like a complete neophyte, he’d asked for hot, and he’s willing to bet there are people laughing in the kitchen right now.
“Basic honey trap,” Finch says. “We met in a bar at Nana, and she made me feel like George Clooney. She was good at it, listened so close it was almost awkward, but she remembered everything. Second time I saw her, she was asking me questions about things I said the first time. Remembered where I grew up, my kid sister’s name. Kind of flattering to a guy nobody’s ever listened to. So I took her out a couple times, and she made me feel interesting, and she banged me brainless, but she did it really nice, like what they used to call a ‘girlfriend experience,’ remember those? Jeeeezus, how pathetic is that? You, too, can come to Asia and pay for a girlfriend experience. Not that they were usually free in the West, were they? Free sex is always the most expensive, right?”
“So I’ve heard,” Rafferty says. “A couple hundred times.” A whoop of laughter goes up from the waitresses dawdling around the cash register.
“Somebody there?” Finch says.
“I’m in the Nana—”
“Lucky you.”
“And the cashier is apparently hilarious.”
“Anything except wait on people. So . . . Lala. She did me right, got past all the defenses and the ‘She’s a pro’ fence we always put up, and then, when I felt like we . . . you know, knew each other, she said she could take me someplace special, someplace where there were beautiful girls who would do anything. She said it in English, and she made the word last like fifteen minutes, the same way my older brother, who has what you might call food issues, says ‘fried chicken.’”
“How old is she?”
“Who can tell with Asians? She only looked twenty-two, twenty-three, far as I was concerned, didn’t look like she’d been ridden around the block a few hundred times the way some of them do—even some of the young ones, know what I mean?”
Rafferty is liking Larry Finch less with each passing moment, but he parks his judgment, stores his incredibly spicy food in his cheek, and says, “Sure.”
“I put up a little resistance, told her she was enough for me, I didn’t need anybody else, all that shit. Gave her some money, like a present. Fact was, I was kind of frightened. About what would be offered.”
Rafferty says, “About whether you’d do it.”
“What’s that supposed to be? Insight?”
“Sorry. Just trying to put things together.” He looks around for the waitress, for any waitress, to refill his glass. “So you go with her to this . . . this building, and when you get there, somebody—”
“Had to be the monster. Minute we go through the door. Bam. Like the ceiling fell on me.”
“And then you come to in the hospital bed, they’ve put the cast on you—”
“Part of it,” Finch says. “They started with one leg, built it about as high as a gym sock, know what I mean? Couldn’t move my ankle. They did that, the first part, after I was conscious again, so I’d know what they had in mind for me. Getting my attention, right? I’m flat on my back in the bed with the monster sitting on my knee, practically broke the fucking thing, while she did the work. Then she told me if I was good, they’d take it off, and if I was bad, they’d build it all the way up and do the other leg, too.”
“What does ‘be good’ mean?” His empty glass disappears and is replaced by a new one, but he’s too engaged making notes even to look up.
A pause. “Sign the checks, I suppose.”
He stops writing, takes a gulp of cold Diet Coke, follows it with some tepid coffee, and thinks for a second. “But you were loaded when you signed—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. All I can figure is that someone, someone before me, fought the dope. Or maybe . . . who knows? Maybe I was the first one they used the dope on. What do I know? And the dope, I can’t be sure about this, but I don’t think the dope was like the hypnosis in some bullshit 1950s movie, you know, took away your will, made you a slave. ‘You vill do vot I vant.’ Not like that. It sure as shit fucked with your memory, though.”
“Then how do you know—”
“Can I get a minute to breathe once in a while? About a month after I got out, I started having dreams about it. Nightmares. I’m in the bed, it’s dark in the room except for a little circle of light, and he’s standing behind me. I can hear him breathing—asshole breathed like a swimming-pool vacuum—and I don’t want to sign the check, and she says—Lala does—she says, ‘Hit him,’ and the monster hits me.”
“The pain,” Rafferty said. “Pain is a memory marker.”
“I
heard something like that.” There’s a pause, and then Finch says, “Once, after they put the stuff in my IV but before I went all the way under, I heard the door to the room open, and when I looked over, I saw a couple of cops, those fucking brown uniforms. The monster brought them in to look at me, like I was a snake in a cage or something. They might have been there more than once. I’m a little foggy about it.”
“Would you recognize them?”
“No. What I saw was uniforms. Just cops.”
Rafferty takes a moment to catch up on his notes and come up with the next question. Outside, the old expats are still at the table, but the cast of women has changed. There are five of them working the guys now, younger and putting a little more back into it as the evening wears on, while behind them the hotel’s other guests stream in from the bars, each with the honey or honeys of the evening in tow. There’s been an explosion of ladyboy bars at Nana in the last few years, and some of the men have made their choices from those establishments. These girls, older and more obviously trans than Lutanh, are often more stylishly dressed than the biological women in their jeans and T-shirts. As a tall, willowy ladyboy ambles past Rafferty’s window with her john, she makes a remark to one of the women working on the men at the table, and the girl whirls and her hands come up, teeth bared, fingers curled into claws. The ladyboy laughs lazily and accompanies her customer into the hotel, tilting her head cozily onto his shoulder. Rafferty sees hatred in the rigidity of the other woman’s back. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of repressed violence, in the sex trade. Not always repressed either.
“What was the room like?” he says. “What kind of building? Anything more you can remember?”
“It was like . . . like a million other places. Just an old apartment house, small, crummy, a couple stories. Maybe wood on the outside, maybe cement. No color I could see. I mean, you know, it was dark. In a nothing neighborhood with a canal going through it. One of those parts of Bangkok that don’t feel like a big city yet, no skyscraper in the front yard. My . . . um, my feeling about the building is that it was empty except for me and them. Door to my room opened into the hallway; there was a kitchen setup against one wall, a little bathroom, a bedroom no one ever went in; that was it. You know, a small, crappy apartment. There’s a trillion of—”
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