“Really.” She takes a drag and blows the smoke away from him. “I thought you came here because you were destined to meet me.”
“Ah, but destiny moves in strange ways.” He laces his fingers together on top of his chest and lets his head sink into the pillow, his eyes on her profile. “In my case it was money. When I was a kid.”
Now he gets the full gaze that always makes his spine tingle. “You never talk about when you were little.”
“Well, I am now. You want to hear about it?”
“Of course.” She gives him the first smile he has seen since Elson drove his snowplow through their evening. “Since it’s my job to help you become human.”
“My father . . .” he begins. Then he falters. Rose’s own father has been dead only two months, and he knows she is still grieving.
“Your father,” she says. She is silent for a moment, and he searches her face, ready to wrap his arms around her. But then she says, “Something else you never talk about.”
“That’s right,” he says, trying to sidestep the moment. “When you don’t hear me talking, it’s probably my father I’m not talking about. Anyway, he spent a long time in Asia before I was born. Ran away when he was fifteen.” He thinks about it for a second. “He was sort of a specialist at running away.”
“Fifteen? How do you run away to Asia when you’re fifteen?”
“Do you want to hear about the money or not?”
“First things first.”
In general, Rafferty would rather eat glass than discuss his father, but now that he’s opened the box, there doesn’t seem to be any graceful way to close it. “He had a fake driver’s license, and he used it to get a passport. Things weren’t so tight in those days. He’d saved a bunch of money from mowing lawns and . . . I don’t know, whatever kids did in those days.”
“He told you this?”
“I asked him. He wasn’t much on volunteering information.”
She puts out the cigarette and doesn’t light another, which Rafferty interprets as progress. “Why did he run away?”
“Carrots,” Rafferty says. “Or anyway, carrots were the last straw, so to speak. The inciting incident, as a writer would say. My father hated carrots, especially cooked carrots. When my father was thirteen, my grandmother died, and my grandfather married a woman my father didn’t like. She was probably okay; she was only in her early twenties, and I’m sure she was doing the best she could, but it wasn’t good enough for him. Just like my mother. She wasn’t good enough either.”
Rose puts her hand on his. “And here you are, trying to build a family.”
“Do you want to hear the story or not?”
“I’d be holding my breath if I weren’t smoking,” Rose says, pulling out a new Marlboro Light.
“Well, he’d been planning to leave since my grandfather remarried, but he had to wait until he looked old enough to get his passport. So he got it, and one day he came in for lunch, and in front of him was a steaming platter of cooked carrots.” He looks over at her. “Are you really interested in this?”
She waves the match until it gives up and then blows on it for good measure. “Don’t be silly. This is your family you’re talking about.”
“Okay. The carrots. He shoved the platter away, and his stepmother said something like, ‘Eat those carrots. There are children starving in China.’ ” He can feel Rose’s gaze, and he says, “Americans used to say that when their kids wouldn’t eat. To make them feel guilty about those poor little Chinese kids, I guess. Anyway, that was the end of the road for my father. He got up, went into the kitchen, got a waxed-paper bag, and brought it back to the table. He shoveled a bunch of the carrots into it and headed for the door. His stepmother said, ‘Where are you taking those?’ and my father said, ‘To the children in China.’ Then he went to his room, got his passport and a metal box that had all his money in it and . . . I don’t know, a change of socks or something, and went down to the port of San Pedro—they were living in Los Angeles—and took a boat to China.”
“Strong kid.” Rose picks up the ashtray and balances it on her stomach. She shoves it with a finger to make it wobble. “How long did he stay there?”
“Years. Until the Communists chased everybody out. Then he went back to California and bought a bunch of property. Eventually he married my mother. Then he packed up and ran away again, when I was sixteen. Back to Asia.”
Rose gives the ashtray a precise quarter turn. “Are you like him?”
“No,” Rafferty says immediately. “For one thing, I don’t run away.”
“I didn’t mean that. I know you’re not going to run out on Miaow and me. But, you know, you both went to Asia, you both wound up with Asian women—”
“Half Asian in my mother’s case.”
“Ah,” Rose says. “Well, that’s very different.”
“We both also have two arms and two legs. And that’s about all we have in common.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” She eyes the ashtray as though she expects it to try to escape.
Rafferty gives her a minute to elaborate and then asks, “Do you want to hear about the money or not?”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“No.”
“Speak to him?”
“No.”
“Did you try?”
“No,” he lies. She says nothing, so he repeats the lie. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Why would I?”
Slowly she turns to face him. “Because he’s your father.”
“The way I see it,” he says, “he chose not to be.”
She picks up the pack of cigarettes and holds it to the light, reading the health warning for the thousandth time, then takes a defiant drag. “He’ll be your father as long as he lives,” she says. “But we’ll talk more about it later. Tell me about the money.”
Rafferty grabs the rope she has thrown him. “He had this box in our house. A metal box with a lock on it. Really banged up, like it had fallen off a cliff or something. For all I know, it was the one he took with him to China in the first place. It sat on a table in my parents’ room, and I wasn’t supposed to open it.”
“So you did.”
“Well, sure. I mean, most of the time I had nothing at all to do. He bought about five hundred acres of desert outside this little pimple of a town called Lancaster and built a house right in the middle of it, then stuck my mother and me inside. The three of us and a bunch of dirt. You can only spend so many days counting rocks or whatever it is that people who love the desert do when they’re wandering around loving it. So I went to school, I read some books, I wrote some stories, and I opened his damn box.”
“Don’t pause now. It’s just getting good.”
“I popped the lock with a bobby pin. It took about forty seconds. And inside there were some old yellowed papers, an expired passport, and a bunch of money.” He holds his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “This thick. But it wasn’t American money—it was from all over Asia. And I’d never seen anything like it.”
Rose’s eyes are focused on her lap, the cigarette forgotten between her fingers. He can actually feel her listening; the energy seems to pull the words out of him.
“Where I grew up,” he says, “everything was brown. The desert was brown, our house was brown—half the time the sky was brown, courtesy of the smog Los Angeles sent us every day. Buildings were brown and square: flat roofs, small windows to keep the heat out. Nothing was ornamented, nothing was designed a certain way just because somebody thought it would look good. It was like they went out of their way to make it ugly.”
“Brown and square,” Rose says. “My village was pretty much brown and square, except when the rice was green.”
“We didn’t even have rice. We had rocks, which were brown, and here and there a plant, and that was brown, too. And then here were these pictures, on the money, I mean. I wasn’t even old enough to think about what the money could buy. I just saw the bills a
s pictures.”
Her gaze is warm on his cheek. “Of what?”
“Clouds. Trees. Buildings with roofs that tilted up at the corners like a prayer. Lakes with bridges over them, and the bridges looked like . . . I don’t know, lace or something. Everything seemed to float. In Lancaster the rocks were heavy and the buildings were like bigger, heavier rocks. And I unfolded that money, and I was looking at a different world, a world where everything was light enough to float. Some of the bills had faces on them, mostly old men, but they had something in their eyes, something that said they knew who they were. There weren’t many Asians near us. My mother’s family had Filipino blood, and there were a few Chinese and Koreans who ran restaurants, but they all looked like everybody else, like they were waiting for something to happen. The people on the money, though—whatever they had been waiting for, it had happened.” He puts his hand over her long fingers, touching the ring. “So there were two new worlds, one in the places and the buildings, and one in those guys’ eyes. And they both looked a lot better than Lancaster.”
“And hiding behind one of those buildings,” Rose says, putting her head on his shoulder, “was me.”
“If I’d been able to see around that corner,” Rafferty says, “I would have come here at fifteen, too.”
“Sweet mouth.” She yawns. Then she says, “Poke, I love my ring.”
“And I love you.” He picks up the ashtray and puts it on the table. “We’ll work this out, Rose. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m all right. But I’d feel better if I knew more about it. Right now the only thing I know is that the money was bad and we’re in the middle of it, Peachy and I. Is there someone you can talk to? Someone who could tell you more?”
“I don’t even have to think about it,” he says. “When the government is causing you trouble, you go to the government.”
!10
Better Than the Real Thing
oung or old?” Arnold Prettyman asks. “Youngish,” Rafferty says. “He’s like what someone said about Richard Nixon: He’s an old man’s idea of a young man.”
“Nixon got a bum rap,” Prettyman says, toying with an eighteen-inch-long tube of rolled paper on the table between them. He has eyes the color of faded denim, as remote as the eyes of a stuffed animal. Rafferty always half expects to see dust on them. His features have bunched for company in the center of his square face, below wavy, rapidly receding, light-colored hair he brushes unpersuasively forward. Lately he has cultivated a pointed little goatee apparently inspired by Ming the Merciless. Before he sprouted the chin spinach, people occasionally told him he resembled the singer Phil Collins, but to Rafferty he’s always looked like what he is, or was: a spy. He spends way too much time staring people directly in the eyes when he’s talking, a trait Rafferty associates with Scientologists and liars, such as spies. He’s fairly sure Prettyman isn’t a Scientologist.
“As hard as it may be to believe, Arnold,” Rafferty says, “I didn’t come halfway across Bangkok to reopen the file on Nixon.”
“Just taking a stand,” Prettyman says. “Anyway, the young ones are the worst. They all think they’re Eliot Ness. Probably carries a pearl-handled gun and is dying to put a notch in it.”
“But you don’t know him.”
“Richard Elson,” Prettyman says, without much interest. He pulls the tube of paper toward him and raps out a quick three-finger rhythm on one of the rolled edges. “Nope. Never heard the name. Not that I really hung with the Seekies. The Service keeps to itself.”
“Just out of curiosity,” Rafferty says, “why would a theoretically secret organization call itself the Secret Service? Kind of lets the cat out of the bag, don’t you think? I mean, why not something innocuous? The Adolphe Menjou Fan Club or the Mauritanian Triangle Stamp League or something?”
“If you’re looking for logic in Washington, I envy your optimism.” Prettyman lifts one end of the roll of paper and lets it drop again. “Don’t forget, these guys want to be important. They’re like twelve-year-olds. If they had their way, they’d probably call it Heroes Anonymous.”
“Okay, so forget Elson personally. What’s the Secret Service doing in Bangkok?”
“Under this administration, anything they want. Mostly, though, they come here about counterfeiting. It’s a little weird, since you’d expect Treasury to be in charge of counterfeiting, but it’s the Seekies’ job. That’s what I mean about logic in Washington.”
“Well, counterfeiting is what he kicked my door in about.”
Prettyman’s eyes have not left Rafferty’s since he looked up from the roll of paper, but now they dart away for a tenth of a second and come right back, and there is real interest in them. He leans forward an eighth of an inch, which for Prettyman is an expansive gesture.
“American currency?”
“No, that’s what I can’t figure out. Thai.”
“Thousand-baht notes,” Prettyman says.
Rafferty squares his chair so the sunlight reflecting off the mirrored wall won’t hit him in the eyes. “Very impressive, Arnold.”
“You don’t want to fuck around with this at all,” Prettyman says. “I know that’s hard for you, but resist the impulse.”
“Why so ominous, Arnold? And what do you know about counterfeit thousand-baht notes?”
“North Korea,” Prettyman says. His lifeless eyes wander the room. He and Rafferty are sitting in a small bar on the second floor of Nana Plaza, a three-story supermarket of sex off Sukhumvit Road. There’s not much affection in Prettyman’s gaze; few places are more forlorn than a go-go bar in the light of morning. He recently either bought the bar or didn’t, depending on which day he’s asked. Rafferty waits; Prettyman is a miser with information. He parts with it as though wondering if he’s spending it in the right place. Eventually he says, “The American government, and especially the Seekies, is obsessed with North Korea.”
Rafferty gives it a beat to see whether anything else is coming. When it’s apparent that Prettyman is finished, he says, “I think it’s pretty interesting myself, but what’s the connection with bad thousand-baht notes?”
Prettyman grimaces as though the prospect of answering the question causes him physical pain. “That’s where they come from. The NKs turn them out by the tens of thousands. And they’re not bad. Aside from the fact that they’re not real money, they’re better than the real thing. That’s one way they spot them: The engraving is actually too good.” He glances at himself in the mirror opposite and feathers his hair forward with his fingertips until he looks a little like Caligula. “Do you know anything at all about this?”
“About North Korea? Or counterfeiting?”
“Both.”
“Not enough,” Rafferty says. “So clue me in.”
“Fine.” Prettyman gives his head a quarter turn, right and left, to check the tonsorial repair job and then sits forward, crossing his hands. “Are you paying me?”
“Oh, Arnold,” Rafferty says. “After all these years.”
Prettyman dismisses the appeal without a moment’s thought. “You know what Molière said about being a professional writer?”
“No,” Rafferty says. “But I’ll bet it’s fascinating.”
“He said, ‘First we do it for love. Then we do it for a few friends. Then we do it for money.’ ”
“Sounds like prostitution.”
“I left that out,” Prettyman says. “That’s what he was comparing writing to.”
“I can see why you might have skipped it.”
“The operative word was ‘professional.’ I’m a professional. Twenty thousand baht.”
“Ten.”
“Fifteen.”
“Twelve-five, and that’s it. You’re not the only spy I know.”
“I’m not a spy,” Prettyman says automatically. “Okay, North Korea. The Norkies have almost no foreign trade. First, they don’t make much of anything, and second, most countries won’t do business with them. And why not, you ask?”
“I do,” Rafferty says. Prettyman reflectively chews his lip as though wondering whether to renegotiate. Rafferty asks, “Was that enough of a response, or would you like me to actually formulate the question?”
Prettyman does a minimalist head shake, little more than a twitch. “Because they’re nuts, that’s why. Just completely, totally, off-the-wall nuts. If North Korea were a person, it would be wrapped in an old blanket, muttering to itself on the sidewalk. Relief organizations send them boats full of rice, since half the fucking country is starving to death, and the Norkie navy sinks the boats. They buy stuff from other countries and don’t accept the shipment, or they accept it and don’t pay for it. This is not a policy that’s going to produce large streams of foreign revenue.”
“Sort of like opening a store and keeping the doors locked.”
“And shooting the guy who delivers your merchandise.” Prettyman picks up the tube of paper and holds it to one eye, like a telescope, then lowers it. “But they need money. The Socialist Paradise—that’s what the Norkie government calls it—spends every nickel it can generate on the military, which, as you might guess, leaves a hole in the budget when it comes to luxuries like food. So they raise money by counterfeiting stuff.”
“You’re telling me that a government is producing funny money.”
“It’s not a government, it’s the Sopranos. You want a statistic?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, here comes one.” He holds up the roll of paper and says, “Remind me to ask you about this. So . . . the statistic: North Korea makes more foreign revenue from counterfeiting than it does from
trade.”
Some sort of response seems called for. Rafferty says, “Gadzooks.”
“Prescription drugs, cigarettes—your girlfriend smokes, right?”
“Like Pittsburgh.”
“Marlboros?”
Rafferty nods.
“Well, your girlfriend’s cigarettes come straight from Kim Jong Il. In 1995, agents intercepted a boat on its way from Taiwan to North Korea carrying cigarette papers with the Marlboro logo. Wrap them around some junk tobacco, and there were so many papers they’d have brought one billion dollars on the street. That’s billion with a b. Nine-tenths of the Marlboros in Southeast Asia are forgeries, courtesy of Office 39, which reports directly to the little guy with the Eraserhead haircut.”
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