Rose.
“You getting sick?” Clemente says, pulling the car into traffic.
“No, but I appreciate the concern.”
“No problem. If you were, I was going to suggest you take a cab.”
Anand says, approvingly, “Such a sweet mouth.”
“It’s a small car,” Clemente says. She makes an expert swerve. “Good. Traffic has thinned out.”
“How long will it take?”
“Barring any of the Bangkok usuals—traffic jams, police activity, some rich kid flipping his Maserati and waiting in the middle of the road for his daddy’s lawyers—maybe twelve to fifteen minutes.”
“What’s the drill?”
Anand says, “Are you armed?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“Then stay behind us,” Anand says. “If one of us shot you, Arthit would be furious.”
“Well, I’d certainly hate to be the cause of something like that. So what are we doing? Driving in and knocking on the door?”
“We’re walking in,” Anand says. “The building is on a dead end with no through traffic, and we don’t want to announce ourselves. The map people found another little street on the other side of the canal, and we can walk from there to a bridge that’s close to the adoption center at the mouth of the soi, and we can go over it on foot and walk right in.”
“Are there kids at the center?”
“We don’t know. It’s closed at this hour. The colonel has someone trying to track down a supervisor, and we’ll be knocking on the door when we get there. In the meantime we’ll behave as though there are. As much as possible, no fire in the building’s direction.”
“And Arthit? Where will he—”
“At the bridge. He’s got a couple of street cops with him, real tough guys, apparently.”
Clemente says, “Be still my beating heart.”
“Wow,” Rafferty says. “Where’d you learn that one?”
She catches his eyes in the mirror and says loftily, “First used in 1705 by William Mountfort in his five-act tragedy Zelmane: or, the Corinthian Queen.”
“Very impressive.”
“Awww. A girlfriend of mine said it once when a really edible guy walked into the restaurant we were in. I thought it was funny, so I looked it up.”
Anand says, “And waited fifteen years for someone to ask you about it.”
“Six,” Clemente says. “But it was worth it.”
“Play sounds like a corker,” Rafferty says.
“Five acts,” Anand says. “Didn’t those people have anything to do?”
“I bet it was in verse, too,” Rafferty says. “An opportunity to experience eternity without having to die first.” His nervousness often expresses itself in mindless chatter.
Clemente says, “The whole line is actually ‘Ha! Hold my brain; be still my beating heart.’”
“Was someone standing there to hold his brain?” Anand asks. “You’d really have to trust whoever it is if you’re going to hand him your brain.”
“There are brains and brains,” Clemente says.
Rafferty leans forward, putting his head over the back of the seat. “Is there a plan? Or is it more productive for us to discuss eighteenth-century—”
Anand says, “Soon as we meet up, Arthit’s two guys will head toward the entry to the street and wait there, in case someone tries to get out that way. If they hear gunfire from our end, one of them will run in to help and the other will stay where he is. We’re going to do some creepy-crawling before we start shooting people because they’ve probably got the guy, your daughter’s friend’s father. We don’t know where he’ll be, so we have to be care—”
“Actually, we do know where he’ll be,” Rafferty says. “I found someone who got away. The room is upstairs, and the window faces west. Across the canal.”
Anand turns to look at him and says, “Nice of you to share this with us.”
“It’s been kind of a fast-moving evening. Maybe you should tell Arthit.”
“What a good idea,” Clemente says. “But you’re the one who knows about it, so why don’t you call him?”
“Two-story building, second story, facing west. There are two people holding him, a woman and a giant. They live downstairs. There. That’s what I know. Give him a ring.”
While Anand is dialing, saying, “A giant?” Clemente turns on the cherry lights and takes a slow, drifting left against all the stoplights through an eight-lane intersection, as though she does it every day. Several cars heroically manage to miss them. “If you’ve got someone who was there,” she says, “maybe we should get him to come with us, sort of a guide. Might save a life or two.”
“I don’t know where he is. I talked to him on the phone.”
“Phooey,” Clemente says. “But wait. Can you phone him?”
“I can try.”
“FaceTime,” she says. “That thing you’re holding is an iPhone, right?”
“Right. Don’t know if his is, but we’ll see.” He hits an instant-redial key.
“Leon and Toot,” Toots says. She yawns. “We close now.”
“It’s Poke. Is Bob still there?” In the front seat, Anand has obviously hit a rocky patch in his conversation with Arthit. He’s using hand gestures to get his point across.
“Him have one more wit’ the road,” Toots says.
“For the road. Can I talk to him?”
“If okay wit’ him. You please wait.”
“Jesus,” Campeau says. “There’s no getting away from you.”
“Call your friend Larry Finch and tell him we’ve almost got them and I need him to call me.”
“Really? I’m proud of you, but don’t let it go to your head. Stay off the phone.” He hangs up.
“Here,” Anand says, holding out Clemente’s phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
Rafferty says, “Be still my beating heart,” and takes the phone. To Clemente he says, “How much longer?”
“Six, seven minutes.” She makes another turn through a red light.
Into the phone, Rafferty says, “We’ll be there in—”
“I heard her,” Arthit says. “Is there anything else you’d like to share about where we’re going? You know, something that might keep us all from getting killed?”
“Hang on, I’m thinking. Apartment house, away from the . . . whatever it is, the adoption agency, two stories, he was on the upper floor, his window looked west, toward—”
“If it’s the same room.”
“He said he had a strong sense that the place was empty except for him and the two of them. Said he never heard their footsteps on the stairs and in the hallway unless they were coming to him, never heard anyone walk past his room, never heard any doors on his floor open or close.”
“So they live downstairs.”
“Well, he usually heard them on the stairs before they came into his room, so they started downstairs. Once in a while, they’d argue, and it would get pretty loud, and that was always downstairs. What else, what else? Yeah, he was hooked up to an IV on a hospital bed. Handcuffed to the bed frame. He . . . uhhh, he said the other one, the man, was a giant.”
“Giant or not, only the two of them?”
“Except once, when he woke up, there were a few cops in the room, just looking at him.”
“Not entirely unexpected,” Arthit said. “Even the Bangkok cops would have caught them by now if someone weren’t on the pad.”
“‘On the pad’?” Rafferty says. “‘Be still my beating heart’? I worry for the future of Thai culture. Did I mention, in the email where I sent you the map, that he knew her as Lala?”
“You did.”
“That’s the name Edward’s father wrote down,” Clemente says, finally sounding excited. “This is beginning to
smell really good.”
“You’re going to stay back, right?” Arthit says. “I don’t want you getting shot by one of my cops.”
“I always stay back.”
“Yeah, and the dish ran away with—”
Rafferty’s phone vibrates. It says unknown.
“Hold on,” he says. “Call you back.”
Larry Finch sounds like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream. “You got ’em? You really—”
“We’re on the way. I want you to help us.”
“How?”
“Just to take one last look at the place, see whether there’s anything you forgot to tell me.”
“How am I supposed—”
“Is that an iPhone? Do you have FaceTime?”
“Yeah.” It’s a cautious “Yeah,” the “Yeah” of a man who’s not going to commit to anything.
“Hang on.” To Clemente he says, “How long now?”
“Three minutes maybe. No stoplights.”
“I noticed.” He says into the phone, “Can you call me back in FaceTime, since you don’t want me to call you?”
There’s a silence, and then Finch says, “When?”
“Two minutes.”
“That fast, huh? Well, do me a favor, wouldja? Shoot them a bunch of times for me.”
He sits on the edge of the bed, pulled awkwardly to his right by the short chains on the handcuffs. The cuffs were less limiting when he was lying down; he’d had a foot, a foot and a half, of movement. Now that he’s sitting, he has to twist his torso sharply toward the head of the bed, to his right, because his left arm is pulled across his chest by the cuff, while his right hangs almost comfortably from its own chain. The disparity in the apparent length of his arms, the left feeling so much shorter, bothers him, interferes with his actions. It throws him off and brings the dizziness back. He finally decides to hamper both hands equally and knots his fingers together like someone pleading for something, perhaps his life. The notion almost amuses him.
They’ve been moving around down there. Making noise.
He arches his back and slides his hips over the edge of the bed until the cast touches the floor. Since the bedsheet moved all over the place, he’s reverted to guessing where the bobby pin is. He thinks the cast will be within a few inches of it, but when he puts his bare foot down, it’s not there.
It’s all right, he tells himself. It’s all right. It’s here somewhere.
A door slams downstairs, loudly enough to echo up the stairway. He tells himself to forget it, lifts the foot and puts it down, lifts the foot and . . .
. . . finds it.
He has an irrational impulse to laugh.
When he was a kid, he was very, very good at picking things up with his toes. He’s about four decades out of practice, but it’s got to be like riding a bike, doesn’t it? Once you’ve done it, you can do it again, right?
Right?
Well, no. The pin is lying flat. For it to be vertical enough for him to pinch it between his toes, it has to be on its side. Which is impossible. He needs something to push it against so it can’t move, and then he has to find a way to slip something else under it and flip it up onto its side, and then he needs to find a way to keep it there until he can get it between his big toe and his second toe, and it’s fucking impossible.
He’s dead.
For only the second time in his adult life, he begins to weep. He sits there, twisted to his right with his legs hanging over the edge of this hellish bed, one foot on a bobby pin that’s only four feet from where he needs it to be, and it might as well be on the surface of Venus, and he’s crying, not well-bred little sniffles but full-out gulping, tear-shedding, snot-snuffling weeping. He’s dead.
And what will happen to Edward?
The last fucked-up act of a fucked-up life. Stranding his only son here with no one to care for him but the aunties, all of whom will grab what they can and run for the hills, and the kid’s mother, who practically kicked him through the front door she was so eager to get rid of him. And once his son got here, once they were together, what was important? Lala.
Lala.
He groans, loudly enough to be heard by someone just outside the door, but he doesn’t care. He’s dead. And Edward . . . well, Edward seems to have a strength of character, obviously inherited from his mother; whatever else you might say, you can’t says she’s weak. Maybe Edward will be better off without him.
But the memory of him as a baby . . . of him and Bessie . . .
His foot has drifted off the pin, and he has the sensation that the foot is slipping across the floor too easily, as though it’s riding on something smooth, even slick. He remains absolutely motionless, up on his right elbow, his torso still twisted to the right, evaluating what he’s just experienced, and then he experimentally pushes his toe down and slides it to the right. It glides.
Paper. His toe is on a piece of paper. Instantly he can see the progression: With his bare foot, push the bobby pin up against the hard surface of the cast so it can’t move; use the bare foot again to slip the edge of the paper beneath the pin; push the paper up to put the bobby pin on edge; then let the paper fall back to the floor, leaving—maybe leaving—the bobby pin standing on its edge; slide the cast aside, praying that the bobby pin doesn’t fall over. Pick it up in his toes and cross his legs to bring the pin up to the edge of the bed. Then one final, agonizing torque with his torso to force the foot holding the bobby pin over the mattress, and drop the pin there. Get his full body back on the bed, without knocking the bobby pin off again, and then bring the pin to him by tugging on the top sheet with his teeth. Pick it up in his mouth and spit it, much more carefully this time, into his right palm so he can go to work on the cuffs.
Simple, he thinks, and then he actually does laugh. He’s made plans more complicated in his life, with even more steps to them, some of them arching across years of enterprise. He abandoned them all, of course, diverted by something that was briefly more appealing and easier to get, but he is good at breaking a complex task into simple steps, to be taken one at a time. And there’s not going to be much to divert him this time.
Unless he’s interrupted.
Fear isn’t going to help. The only way to allay the fear is to focus on what he’ll do once the cuffs are off. Break the cast at the lowest point of the line he’s sawed into it and see whether it will let him bend his knee. If it doesn’t, saw like hell and break more plaster until the knee is clear, get out of bed, not letting the cast thump on the floor, and figure out how to get out of the building.
Maybe they won’t have killed him by then. Maybe the dope will have faded.
What floor is he on anyway? Seems to him the building was only two stories high. Must be the second.
Easy peasy.
He uses his big toe to slide the bobby pin up against the cast. He closes his eyes and puts his toes on the piece of paper. A muscle in his left side, stretched out for too long, cramps, and he inadvertently turns his head in its direction, and the fluid shifts. Closes his eyes in despair.
This is a really big wave.
34
The Enemies Are Gravity, Movement,
and Emotional Upset
“I like your apartment,” the beaky, orange-haired American boy says, and then he rolls his eyes in embarrassment at how he’s opened the conversation. He’s perched on the hassock, so tentatively he might be waiting for it to explode. That sentence was obviously the only thing in the world he could think of to say.
Miaow is trying with all her being to hear what’s happening on the other side of the closed door to Rose and Poke’s bedroom, so she says, “What?”
“The, uhhh . . .” His voice fades away, and he goes a deep, deep scarlet. Now he either has to repeat himself or think of something else, and from the look on his face there isn’t anything else. Miaow knows
that she blushes, too, on occasion, but not like the warning light in a cockpit; the darker hue of her skin mutes the red. “The apartment?” the boy says, making it into a question. His knee is bouncing up and down, almost too fast to see.
“Yes,” she says. “The apartment. What about the—Who are you? Where have you been? What’s wrong with my—”
He gives her a rapid-fire sequence of defensive blinks. “I think . . . I think they should tell you. They kicked me out a lot. Like now, when they left me out here. With you. Not that . . . uhhh—I’m pretty sure she’s all right.”
In fact, Rose hadn’t looked all right when she was towed in, supported by Fon on the left and, on the right, a farang woman whose nose announced her as the boy’s mother. Rose had a paper-white pallor that made her look like someone who has given far too much blood.
Miaow makes a conscious effort to relax her voice. “But I’ve been waiting all night. Going crazy. At least tell me where you—”
“Where? Well, we went from someplace with a lot of food stands, which was where your mother was when she almost fainted—”
“She fainted?”
“No, no, she didn’t. We . . . um, kept her up, and then we got a chair, and a bunch of women, they . . . So anyway, we went to a doctor’s office, because the other Thai lady, your mom’s friend, said your mom was pregnant and there had been a problem before, and the other other Thai lady, who came with your mom’s friend, she said she was maybe going to lose the baby—your mom, I mean. She was—the other lady—was, like, somebody who helps people have babies? A doo-wop, something like that?”
“Lose the baby?” She sits forward, and several pink-stained pages of Pygmalion fall to the floor.
He nods, registers what he’s doing, and shakes his head instead. “But that was before. I think she’s okay now. We went to a doctor and then the hospital—”
Miaow says, “I’m going in there.”
“You can’t. I mean, my mother says you can’t, and the . . . the doctor said, after the procedure—”
“What do you mean, a procedure?”
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