If he can just maintain focus. He was always focused, it was one of his strong points—one, he supposes, of the few: He kept his eye on the ball. He kept the end in sight. He can do this now, he knows it. He will live through this. With the only surge of optimism he’s felt since he first woke up in this bed, he uses his tongue to work the bobby pin out of his mouth, spits it into his cuffed right hand, and watches it slide out of his palm, bounce soooo slowly off the edge of the bed as he scrapes his wrist raw against the inside edge of the cuff trying to catch it, and then it obeys the law of gravity, all the way to the floor. A million miles down.
Part Four
THE FALLS
29
Define “Idiotic”
The phone displays a picture of Miaow he took when she was rehearsing for Small Town, the play in which she and Edward played kids falling in love. She hates the picture, but as he told her, it’s his phone. Rafferty sweeps aside the hand-drawn map he was going to discuss with Arthit, parks in his head the things he wants to share about his conversation with Larry Finch, takes a deep breath to clear his head, and answers.
“Fon called me,” Miaow says, without a greeting. There’s an edge to her voice he can’t recall having heard before.
“Why not me?”
“How would I know? But she says that Mom wasn’t—isn’t—feeling well, so they went back to Fon’s—”
“Not feeling well? What does that mean?”
“I’m telling you what she said. She wouldn’t stay on the phone.”
“Do you know where Fon lives?”
“No.”
“Well, did you ask about the baby, whether anything happened—”
“What do you think I asked about? She said I shouldn’t worry, they’d be home later.”
He’s up and signaling for the waitress to bring him a check. Outside, the party of old-timers is down to two. The man in the wheelchair is asleep, slumped back in the chair with his chin on his chest, a spill of beer in front of him, dripping off the edge of the table onto the knee of his pants. “Then what? She hung up?”
“Yes, she hung up. What do you do when you don’t want to stay on—”
“Okay, okay. Did you call her back?”
“Poke,” Miaow says. She rarely addresses him by name. “If I’d called her back and she answered and if I’d learned anything more important than what I just said, don’t you think I’d have told you about it?”
“So she didn’t answer. When you called her back.”
“That’s right.” There’s a pause, and he can see her, alone in the apartment, probably dead center on the couch. She always claims the whole thing when she can. After those years on the street, space and silence are still luxuries. “She said I shouldn’t be worried, but I am,” she says. “Fon sounded . . . she sounded scared.”
“Well,” he says, swallowing, “there’s no point in you and me being—”
“Don’t father me. I know how worried you are.”
“Okay,” he says. “We’ll be worried together.”
She says, “I’m frightened.”
After a moment of arguing with himself about being the reassuring adult, he gives up and says, “So am I.”
“Can you . . .” she says.
“Can I what?”
“Can you come home?”
“Not right now,” he says. “I have to meet somebody, I really do. But as soon as it’s over, I’ll be there. And anytime you need to talk, call me.”
“Okay,” she says. “I guess.”
“Tell you what. I’ll be there in an hour. Is that okay?”
“What do you have to do?”
He doesn’t want to talk about separating Lutanh and Edward. “Something you’d approve of. I’ll tell you about it later.”
When she’s no longer on the line, he stands at the table hearing her voice in his ear. It has sounded higher, younger, more vulnerable than usual in the past year or so, since she began to act. He makes a rough estimate of the amount of money he owes for the food, adds some to it, and waves the money in the air at the cashier before running out through the sliding glass doors and down to Sukhumvit to find another in an unending line of taxis.
“It’s me,” he says, “Poke.” He puts the phone on speaker and goes back to studying the Google map of Bangkok he’s brought up on the screen. Whoever occupied the cab before him had broken the rules and smoked, and it stinks.
“Hi,” Edward says. “What’s happening? Is something wrong?”
“I need to talk to Lutanh.” The cab makes the zigzag across Sukhumvit that gets his attention every time, into lanes that run the opposite way during rush hour. Once he knows he’s going to live, he opens the window to thin the stench of the smoke and looks down again at the map. It’s tiny. “Is she . . . I mean, can I talk to her?”
“She went to bed,” Edward says. “I gave her something to eat, and . . . and she was tired, you know, she got beat up pretty bad.” He hesitates, and then he says, “Do you really need to wake her up?”
Catching himself leaning forward again in the cab, Rafferty sits back. He says, “I do,” and lets out an enormous breath that surprises him. It tells him how much tension he’s been tucking away for the past few hours. There is, he thinks, a closed door between Edward and Lutanh. If Miaow’s heart is going to be broken, at least it won’t be tonight or tomorrow. His spirits rise a little, and he uses the energy to wonder where in the house she is. He’d gone upstairs only as far as Buddy Dell’s office, which was the first door in the hallway, a long hallway. The place had seemed, from the street, to have a lot of upstairs rooms.
After thirty seconds or so, long enough to climb a flight of stairs, he hears Edward knocking and then knocking again. “I’m pretty sure she’s asleep,” the boy says, and then knocks a third time and says, more loudly, “It’s Miaow’s dad.”
I’ve become Miaow’s dad, Rafferty thinks, enlarging the map as much as he can. He’s just beginning to locate things when Lutanh says, in a voice like a truckload of gravel, “Hello?”
“I need you to get up and get dressed,” he says. He considers for a moment whether to tell her where they’re going and decides she might refuse to go anywhere near the man. “We have an errand to run. It’s important.”
“They’re behind us right now,” Clemente says. “Where are you?”
“Half a mile away from Silom, heading toward the guy’s hotel. Traffic’s the shits. Have they made any attempt to get closer or pull you over, anything aggressive?”
“No. They’re being careful. They’re usually five, six cars back, but they get close enough from time to time that we can’t miss them. I think it’s mostly a power show: We know what you’ve been doing. We’ve been zigzagging, stopping every now and then to pretend to run an errand. When we take a soi, they wait until we’ve gone a little way before they turn behind us.”
“Are you sure there’s only one car?” Lutanh is staring at him out of her blackened and swollen eyes, openmouthed—perhaps because she can’t breathe through her nose—looking like she’s debating whether to jump out of the cab. She’d started getting nervous when he told the cabbie he wanted to go to Silom. When he’d explained the purpose of the visit, she’d argued with him, her voice as high as a biologically female soprano’s. The cops were no good, she’d said, not even that lady cop. They’d just demand money from the farang and then let him do what he wanted with her. The cops didn’t care about people like her. A Thai commits murder, they arrest a Lao or a Burmese every time. She wanted to go back to Edward’s.
He reaches over to put a reassuring hand on her wrist, and she snatches her own hand away as though he’s on fire. She’s sitting right up against the door. If it popped open, she’d pitch sideways into the street. Looking at her face brings back to the surface the rage he felt when he first saw her, but he smiles and says, “Seat
belt.”
Lutanh ignores him and for the ninth or tenth time passes her fingertips down the bridge of her nose as though assessing the damage. On the phone Clemente says, “I always wear one, but thanks for the thought.” Anand says something Rafferty can’t quite hear, and Clemente laughs. “Yeah,” she says, “there’s only one car, as far as we can tell.”
“When you stop to do your errands, what happens?”
“First and second time, they pulled over, too. Third time, which was the last so far, they went past us as though we weren’t there, but a minute or two later we drove past them and they pulled out behind us again.”
“How many people inside?”
“Minimum two, in front. Could be another two in back. Windows are tinted, we didn’t get much of a look.”
“What I’d like to—” His phone buzzes to signal an email. “Let me put you on hold.” He presses to accept the incoming message, which is from Arthit, clicks on the email link that’s the only thing it contains, and finds himself looking at an image. No text, just a detailed, magnified map of a section of Bangkok, upon which has been imposed a long, narrow, very acute isosceles triangle in bright orange with the base—the narrowest of the three sides—ending at the right side of the screen: due east. He enlarges it and sees that the apex, the point, is at the Baiyoke Tower. The phone buzzes again to signal a call, but Rafferty is already at the edge of his technological expertise, so he blinks a couple of times and says to Lutanh, “I’ve got three calls at the same time.”
She says, “And?”
“And I don’t know what to do.”
“You give me,” she says, extending her hand. She takes the phone and glances at the screen, squints at him dubiously, and says, “This . . . email?” She makes it sound like something he should have wiped off his shoe.
“Yes.”
“You think email get angry, you say bye-bye?”
“Um,” he says, and she closes the email and looks down at the display. “You want Arthit?” she says.
“Yes, but try not to lose—”
“Here.” She hands it to him.
“Where are you?” Arthit asks. Lutanh has put the phone on speaker.
“On the way to Silom.”
“Did you see the map?”
“Looking at it as we speak,” Poke says, wondering how to get back to it.
“Well, keep yourself available,” Arthit says. “I’ve got three people working on that triangle right now.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard to find him,” Rafferty says, “with a word fragment like ‘ity’ in the equation.”
“I’m sure that will reassure them. Think how nice it would be if it were the beginning of the word.”
“There are only so many words—”
“One of them, unfortunately, is ‘city.’ Why are you going to Silom?”
“I live there,” Rafferty says, feeling truthful and evasive at the same time.
“Do you want to be around when this thing goes down?”
Lutanh pinches his arm, and he glances over at her impatient face and raises a hand that means, Wait a minute. “It’s Edward’s father, remember?” he says to Arthit, seeing Lutanh’s eyes sharpen when he says the boy’s name. “The kid came to me. Plus, I’m the one who has to answer to Miaow.”
“I’ll be back to you.” Arthit hangs up.
“You maybe find Edwudd papa?” Lutanh says to Rafferty.
“Well, we’ve got a triangle. Hold on a minute.”
He’s found his way back to Arthit’s map, and Lutanh is looking at it with him, squeaking a little each time she tries to inhale through her nose, when the phone vibrates again and Lutanh says, “You want talk other friend?”
The display says clemente. “Yes,” he says. She does something to the screen, barely glancing at it, and he says, “I’m back. That was Arthit.”
Clemente says, “He doesn’t know what we’re—”
“No. Of course not. But I gave him some information a little earlier that might help him figure where the murdered men were held.”
“You think he might locate the place tonight?”
“Possibly. I mean, I hope so.”
“Could be a full evening,” Clemente says. “What do you want to do about our little parade?”
“I thought it might be fun to get behind them while they’re behind you. Tail them kind of closely.”
A man—has to be Anand—says, “Fun? Are you crazy?”
“Well, if you don’t want me to . . .”
“For what possible reason?” That’s Clemente.
“I don’t know. I’m just pissed off. I want to fuck with somebody.”
Lutanh says, “Talk bad.”
“Mr. Rafferty,” Clemente says, “fucking with somebody is the whole point of this errand.”
“I don’t feel like waiting.”
“Are you in a cab?” In the front seat, the driver sits up.
“Yes.”
“Well, forget it. No cabdriver is going to—”
“Ahhh,” Rafferty says, letting it go. “I know that. But look, you don’t want these guys to be at the hotel while we’re upstairs. They could screw everything—”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“See? I’m not useless.”
“But what can you—Wait, tell me you’re not going to do anything idiotic.”
Rafferty says, “Define ‘idiotic.’”
“Getting these guys angry. Getting yourself killed. Getting me killed.”
“Angry or killed. Okay, I promise. Are they staying right with you or is it sort of elastic?”
“Elastic.”
“Good. Where are you?”
“On Surawong.”
He thinks for a second. “Okay. Give me about five minutes, get an extra few car lengths ahead and dick around with them to kill a little time, and then do a few loops to wind up heading east on Silom. Get to Patpong and take it through the snarl at the end of Patpong, to where the traffic begins to move again, and then keep an eye on the rearview mirror. Are they in one of those silvery cars, a white one, or a black-and-white SUV?”
“I told you already. The SUV.”
“And you?”
“The little white one with no acceleration.”
“Okay. Across Patpong keep your eyes on the mirror, and when they stop, you get lost. And I mean lost.”
Anand says, loudly, “Nothing stupid.”
“Me?” Rafferty says. After hours of nervous frustration, he feels like a battering ram. “Stupid?”
It’s just as much of a knot at Patpong at eleven-thirty as he hoped it would be: lines of avaricious taxi drivers quoting ridiculous fares to guys who are half frantic to get back to their rooms with their new conquests, people with suspect blood-alcohol levels wobbling in the street, the occasional brave and/or foolish soul fording the traffic in an attempt to cross but getting stuck at the center divider, looking for a hidden opening like the one Rafferty and Miaow use. “This is fine,” he says to the driver when they’re at the center of the clot, where there’s barely room to move. “This is perfect.” He leans forward and hands him a couple of bills, tells him to keep the change, and says to Lutanh, “Open the door.”
She gives him a long look and then turns and scans the crowd pouring out of Patpong, clearly looking for someone who might be a threat. He says, “Out, out. Don’t worry, I’m with you.” She regards him without conspicuous confidence, but a moment later they’re on the sidewalk.
“Ice cream,” he says. He’s checking the crowd, too. She’s drawing glances, but he’s pretty sure it’s only because she’s been so badly beaten up. “Right there, Häagen-Dazs. Get yourself a big cup and sit in the back, facing away from the window. Give me ten minutes.”
She takes the five-hundred-baht bill he’s
holding out. “Maybe I run away,” she says.
“You can’t. We need you with us. Without you we won’t know we’ve got the right guy.”
She shakes her head. “Cop no good.”
“Really. I suppose they’re better in Laos.”
“Lao cop no good,” she says, her eyes on the crowd. “Thai cop no good, too.”
“These cops are fine,” he says. “Listen, we need you if we’re going to fuck this guy up.”
“Bad talk,” she says again. Then she blinks. “Fuck up?”
“You bet.”
Whatever she’s looking for in his face, it would seem that she sees it, because she nods. She says, “I get ice cream.”
He’s five or six layers of people back in the crowd, behind a posse of tall and very drunk Aussies who are singing three different songs at the same time, when the little white police car goes by, Clemente at the wheel and Anand with the window down, looking for him. He pushes the button to dial them as they pass by, says, “I see you, keep moving,” and elbows his way into the people gathered at the end of the night market that straddles the center of Patpong 1, trying to position himself to face the traffic. Before he can weave his way through the last bit of the crowd, someone bumps him from behind; it’s one of the Aussies, miffed that Rafferty pushed between them.
“In a hurry, mate?” says the Aussie who bumped him. Rafferty ignores him and looks back at the traffic.
It’s already been twenty seconds, thirty seconds, the cars are crawling past, and he’s beginning to think the cops trailing Clemente gave it up when, five or six cars down and inching through the crowd, he sees the tall black-and-white SUV inching toward him.
The Aussie taps his shoulder, hard. “I asked you a question, Jack.”
Rafferty thinks, Why not? This is better. Giving the SUV a little more time to get nearer, he turns to the Aussie and says something almost under his breath. The Aussie’s friends both say, “What?” and Rafferty clears his throat, then waves the tallest one down, and when the man bends toward him, Rafferty plants an open hand on his face and shoves hard. The tall Aussie staggers back and goes down, but his friends leap forward, and with them at his heels Rafferty takes off at a diagonal run, weaving between people with the shouting Aussies grabbing at his shirt until he spots the SUV, and then, shrugging off a restraining hand, he charges directly at the front fender of the SUV, which is traveling at about three miles an hour, slaps the the panel as hard as he can with his hand to simulate impact, and leaps up onto the hood, landing on his side and rolling back until he’s lying flat across the windshield. He hears the Aussies shouting at each other to get the hell out of there, a woman obligingly begins to scream, and the SUV jolts to a halt.
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