He’s just slowly beginning to move when the driver’s door opens. A second later, a pair of hands grasps his ankle and yanks him across the hood to the accompaniment of a grunt from the cop who’s pulling him. He doesn’t resist, just lets himself slide and then crumples to the street on his back, an out-thrown arm beneath the SUV.
He looks up, past a round, brown-clad belly, at a tight mouth, a pair of wide nostrils, and two furious, deep-set eyes. “You hurt my car,” the cop says, bending down. The cop grabs his shirt, drags him out from under the SUV, and then, with a low, beer-scented grunt, pulls him to his feet and shoves him against the front fender. “You crazy!” he shouts in English. “You drunk?”
“Men were chasing him,” someone says in accented Thai, and over the cop’s shoulder Rafferty sees Lutanh. She has her hands knotted anxiously in front of her heart, but she takes a step forward. “Three men.”
A woman, a bar girl on her way out, pulls her arm free of her customer’s to say, “I saw it, too. Big men.”
“There,” Lutanh says, pointing at the three Australians, who are frantically trying to shove their way back into the anonymity of the crowd. “Those men.”
Rafferty can almost see the cop think, One versus three, and decide to pick on the solo. “Why they chase you?” the cop demands.
“They pushed me down,” Lutanh says from a couple of yards away, still in Thai. “They laughed at me and pushed me down. He pulled them off me, and they start to chase him. They wanted to—”
“Okay, okay.” The cop’s focus moves from Rafferty, and he looks after the three Aussies. He would have to run through the crowd to get them, and he’d be outnumbered, and it’s the last thing in the world he wants to do. He’s searching for some way to save face by being right. Rafferty decides to make it easier.
“It was my fault, not your driver’s,” he says, sticking to English. “I was running away from them and not looking. If there’s any damage to your car, I’ll be happy to take care of it.”
“Mmmm,” the cop says. He’s a captain, Rafferty registers, not a rank likely to be out cruising the tourist areas. He thinks, Someone is worried about Clemente.
“Here,” the cop says, pointing at a scratch on the fender that’s at least three feet from where Rafferty hit it. The cop tilts his head, assessing the damage. “Four thousand baht,” he says.
The bar girl who’d backed Lutanh up makes a fart sound with her mouth and links her arm again through her date’s to lead him away. The show is over.
“Fine,” Rafferty says, reaching into his pocket and wishing he’d given less to Aspirin. “Thank you, Colonel.”
The cop doesn’t correct him on the rank, just stands there, hands on his hips, looking at Rafferty. For a moment the mean little eyes narrow, and Rafferty guesses he’s replaying the incident, looking for a little more money, regretting not having asked for more, and also weighing whether the whole thing might for some reason have been intentional. His eyes flick to Lutanh, and Rafferty can almost see the train of thought: a farang, three drunk men, witnesses, Patpong—what could it have to do with the cops he’d been following? Rafferty takes out his wallet, where he keeps a wad of emergency money, counts out five thousand-baht bills and says, in Thai, “A little extra for your inconvenience.”
The cop nods, grunts, palms the money, slips it into his pocket. Rafferty has been trying to sound out the characters in the name on the tag pinned over the pocket and comes up with “Teerapat.” To Lutanh, Teerapat says, “What happened to you?”
“Boxing,” Lutanh says. “Boyfriend.”
“You fight too much.” He extends a hand. “ID card.”
Lutanh hesitates and then reaches into the pocket of Miaow’s denim dress. Rafferty watches her take out a laminated card and look at it unhappily as she reaches into the pocket again. When her hand comes out this time, there’s something tightly folded in it, and Lutanh slides it beneath the card and hands it to Teerapat.
Teerapat glances at the card, lowers his head to look at it a little more closely, and his eyes come up to Lutanh’s. He pushes his lips out, clearly thinking, and he uses his thumb to slide the card aside. When he looks back down, Rafferty’s five-hundred-baht note is visible there. He says, “Don’t get in fights,” and extends the hand with the card protruding between thumb and forefinger. She slips the card out, leaving the bill in his palm, and he closes his fist on it and then lifts his hand and turns it palm down to check his watch. “Look at the time,” he says. He takes a last, unhopeful glance in the direction Clemente was going, nods at Rafferty, scans the crowd once—it looks reflexive, automatic, to Rafferty—and turns back toward the SUV. Rafferty stays where he is until the vehicle is halfway down the block and then heads to his left, as though to follow it on foot. Passing Lutanh, he says, without looking at her, “Ice cream.”
30
I’ve Always Been Partial to “Putting Things on a Firmer Footing”
Rafferty’s watch reads a few minutes after 12:40 a.m. when the little white police car makes the turn into the dim, narrow street where the hotel is. Anand and Poke are shoehorned in the backseat, their knees high against the back of the front seat. Clemente is driving, and Lutanh is riding shotgun and calling out directions, in response to Clemente’s inspired suggestion that she should be their guide, even though they all know where it is.
“Uhhh,” she says, shifting in her seat. “That’s it. There.” The bottom has dropped out of her voice; it sounds like it’s coming from inside an empty bottle.
“Where should I park?” Clemente asks, trying to put her back in charge.
“I . . . we, before, with man, I walk.”
“Well,” she says, “why don’t you and Poke and Anand get out here and wait for me, and I’ll be back in a minute.”
Lutanh says, “I stay in car. When you go, I want stay in the car.”
“But we need you to—”
“And Poke stay with me. I want.” She reaches over and puts both hands on the handle of the door beside her, as though to hold it closed against anyone who might try to open it.
“You have to come,” Clemente says. She leans over and brushes a wisp of hair from Lutanh’s forehead. “You’re the only one who can tell us we’ve got the right man.”
“I have a gun,” Anand says, taking the male approach. “Clemente has a gun.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen, sweetie,” Clemente says. “We’re going to go in and talk to the person behind the desk—”
“Nobody there before,” Lutanh says, her voice as tight as a wire.
“We’ll get him there. I’ll talk to him, and you can stand a little away, between Anand and Mr. Rafferty. And then we’ll talk to the security man at the elevator—”
“Him not there, too. But then, after, I come out, him there. He see me.”
Rafferty says, “Lutanh, he’ll be too busy pissing his pants to think about you.”
She cranes around to look at him. She says, “I don’t know. He . . . he . . . nobody ever hurt—”
“We do know that,” Rafferty says. “That’s why we’re here. Look at us: you, two people with guns, and me.” She breaks eye contact, and his heart sinks. He hasn’t thought this through at all. “I know, I know. The last time you helped me, you got hurt.”
“You were a hero,” Anand says to her. He’d been there, although too far away to help.
“But this time—” Rafferty breaks off beneath the sheer weight of it. He says, “Maybe you’re right. Tell you what. Anand and I will go in, and you and Clemente—”
“Hold it,” Clemente says. “This is personal for me. Anand can stay with you. I want you with us, but Anand—”
“Why is it personal?” Lutanh says.
“Nobody beats up women when I’m around,” Clemente says between her teeth.
“I’m girl, not woman,” Lutanh says. “Why not?�
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“I won’t talk about that,” Clemente says. “Because I’ll cry, and then you really won’t have any confidence in me. But I’ll tell you one thing: It’s why I’m a cop.”
Lutanh says, “I have con-confence in you.”
“Me, too,” Anand says. “Of course, I’ve seen her in action and you haven’t.”
The car is silent for a moment as Rafferty holds his breath, and then, Lutanh says in Thai, “Who cares where we park? You’re a cop. Let’s just go.”
Although Rafferty’s never been here before, he knows everything he needs to know about the place within five seconds of following Clemente and Anand through the door. They’re moving in a tight cluster because it seems to calm Lutanh, who’s beside him. The scene of the crime is an old, cheap apartment house, given a surface-deep renovation decades ago and reincarnated as a hotel to take advantage of the tourist bonanza of Patpong. The lobby floor is gritty and needs sweeping, a couple of the overhead fluorescents need replacing, the artificial flowers need dusting, and the man behind the counter needs more sleep than he seems to get, because he’s yawning when he comes out of the back room at Clemente’s insistent pounding on the bell.
He stops yawning when he registers the uniforms. His eyes do a quick tour of the four of them, slowing when they come to the wreckage of Lutanh’s face, and he sighs. He’s small, slope-shouldered, and prematurely balding. On his chin a big black mole sprouts black hairs, like a spider on its back. He chooses Anand as the person in charge and says, “How can I help you?”
“How’s your license?” Clemente says, stepping in front of Anand.
The counterman blinks. “You’d have to ask the owner.”
“And the papers for the conversion into a hotel? And the back taxes? I suppose they’re all in order?”
She gets a head shake and a shrug. “It’s been a hotel as long as I’ve been here.”
“Get a lot of minors?”
The man spreads his hands. “Not while I’m here.”
Clemente says, “I can arrange some.”
“I’m sure you could. But why bother? There’s nothing you could ask me to do that I won’t, if it’s within my power.”
“The man in 422,” Clemente says. “Four things. First, I need the key. Second, I need your photocopy of his passport. Third, he is never to be allowed back into this place, not by you, not by anyone. Fourth, we’re going up to see him, and he is not going to know we’re coming. Am I making myself understood?”
“Yes.” He tries on a smile, but it doesn’t fit and he drops it. “Which do you want first, the key or the photocopy?”
“The key. If you contact him in any way, when I’m going up there—if I even suspect he knew we were coming, I will put you in jail and lose you there. You’ll stay lost until—Do you have children?”
The man swallows loudly, and his eyes go to Lutanh again. “Yes. Two.”
“How old?”
“Nine and eleven.” Out of the corner of his eye, Rafferty sees Anand moving quickly toward the corner where the elevator and the security guard, probably, are.
“Well,” Clemente says, “by the time we find you again, they’ll both be married.”
“He won’t know,” the counterman says. “Not from me.”
“Fine. Give me my stuff. Go back to sleep.”
When she has the key and the photocopy, she turns to go, slowing when she sees that Anand isn’t in sight. She takes a few steps in the direction of the elevator anyway and waits for them. Rafferty starts to follow, but he feels a tug on his sleeve. When he looks down at Lutanh, she takes his hand.
He squeezes it and says, “Do you know the English expression ‘piece of cake’?”
“I like that one,” Clemente says. She’s moved around to Lutanh’s other side.
Lutanh says, “No. I know what is cake, but—”
“It means ‘This will be easy,’” Clemente says.
From the direction of the elevator, they hear a grunt and a bang like a chair going over. Clemente takes Lutanh’s free hand, and the three of them head toward the noise.
The bang wasn’t a chair, it was a whole desk. Standing behind it, his eyes wild and the neck of his shirt knotted in Anand’s hand, is the guard who’s tasked with recording the ID numbers for the broad variety of hookers whom the hotel guests take up to their rooms. He looks at Lutanh, who has slowed at the sight of him, and he shakes his head in what looks like resignation.
“Four-two-two,” he says without being asked.
“We already know that,” Clemente says. She puts her arm around Lutanh’s shoulders and eases her forward. “Is this the man who was on duty?”
Lutanh says, “Is,” but it’s barely a whisper.
“Let me see your book,” Clemente says. “Our young friend here went up to the fourth floor last night, so naturally you checked her card, signed her in, made a note of the room.”
“I . . . you see, I . . . I couldn’t—”
“Then how did you know she was old enough? Look at her. Are you telling me you didn’t even ask to see her card?”
“I was in the bathroom.”
“So,” Anand says, “you’re saying there’s nothing in that book.”
“No. No, there—”
“Well, this is your lucky day,” Clemente says. “Anand, help the man with his desk.”
Anand steps back and studies it for a moment. “Looks easiest from this side,” he says, making a Pick it up gesture with both hands.
Clemente says, “Here’s the catch. You do not call up to 422. Got it?”
“I hope you throw him out the window,” the guard says, hoisting his desk. “He’s terrible.”
The wet-paper smell, the dripping air conditioner, the squish of the carpet underfoot—everything is just as it was. When she was still a boy, Lutanh had a nightmare that came back over and over, her mother turning to her and smiling to bare a mouthful of long, pointy teeth. After a certain number of times, she learned to wake herself up before her mother pulled back her lips to reveal her tiger’s mouth. But that won’t work here, so she squeezes Rafferty’s hand hard enough to make him inhale sharply, and he slows down, saying, “It’s all right, I promise, it’s all right.”
“This is the plan,” Clemente whispers as they approach the door. “You two stay out here until we call you.” She says to Lutanh, “When we call you, it will be safe.”
Lutanh nods, standing very close to Poke. She’s studying the carpet.
“Here we go,” Clemente says. Unexpectedly, she reaches down and puts a finger beneath Lutanh’s chin to tilt her head up, then leans down and whispers, “Not many people have a chance to get even. I never did.” Then she puts both hands up, just a moment’s silent pause to give everyone a chance to center and prepare for what’s to come. She nods at them all, turns to the door, and puts her hand on the handle. Anand unholsters his gun.
Lutanh says, in a shaky whisper, “Two lock. One inside.”
Clemente says, “Anand?” and Anand comes up beside her. She whispers, “And one, and two, and three,” and on “three” she inserts the card in the slot and jams the handle down, and Anand raises a leg and kicks the door open so it slams against the wall behind it. Clemente and Anand shove their way through the door, guns in hand, saying, “Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move!”
The door starts to sigh closed behind them, and Rafferty steps forward and stops it with his foot. Lutanh stays where she is.
Inside, Clemente says, “You. Into the bathroom and close the door and stay there.” A terrified-looking someone in underclothes—boy, girl, Rafferty can’t tell which—bolts toward them, throwing a surprised glance at Rafferty and Lutanh, standing in the open door, and disappears to their right. A second later the bathroom door slams.
“In the center of the room,” Clemente says.
A man’s voice begins to bluster, but before he can get more than a couple of words out, Clemente says, “I’m going to show you why.” More loudly, she says, “Mr. Rafferty?”
Rafferty says, “Ready?”
“Okay,” Lutanh says. She reaches out, squeezes his hand again, and lets it drop. “You first.”
He hesitates for just a second, thinking she still might run, but she’s looking up at him, the swollen eyes and split lip shocking him yet again, and she shakes her head. “Me okay.”
“No wonder Miaow admires you,” he says, and goes in.
The heat slows him—the man doesn’t have the air-con on—and then Rafferty smells the meat, not rotten, not really spoiled, but heavy, oily, oppressive. What he thinks of is a fine spray of blood in the air, but then he’s all the way in and he tunes it out in self-defense.
The man wears white underpants. He’s big and soft, with a butterfat body concealing a muscled frame. The plumpness clashes with the military shortness of his hair. Heavy bandages, already soiled, are wrapped around his tattooed knee, and there’s a large butterfly dressing, greasy with food, on one cheek. He gives Rafferty a puzzled look, and then Rafferty steps aside.
The man says, “Oh.” He looks everywhere but at Lutanh.
Lutanh says, a bit shakily, “Hello.”
“She . . . she stabbed me,” he says to Anand. “She stole from me.”
“After you beat her half to death,” Clemente says in English.
In a corner at one end of the couch, Rafferty sees a backpack. Protruding from it are some broken bits of wood with something filmy and reflective—plastic food wrap—clinging to them. He nudges Lutanh.
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