“Another reason for her to quit.”
“But your Mr. Elson doesn’t care about cigarettes, or fake Viagra, or AIDS drugs that don’t actually do anything. He cares about money, American money. The same printing plant in Pyongyang that makes the extra-fancy thousand-baht bills makes American fifties and hundreds that are so good they’re called ‘supernotes.’” Prettyman shakes his head in what might be admiration. His eyes briefly border on expressive. “You have to give them credit. These things are so perfect the Seekies had to blow them up to about twenty feet long and project them on a floor in Washington to find the telltales. They even got the ink right. You heard of color-shifting ink?”
“Is this going to cost me extra?”
“Look at it from different angles, it’s different colors. Green and black, mostly. We use it on the new bills now, because it was supposed to be impossible to counterfeit. Well, it isn’t. And the paper is the same, with a cloth fiber content of three-quarters cotton and one-quarter linen.”
“I thought the paper was a secret, like the formula for Coca-Cola.”
“The Norkies were bleaching one-dollar bills for a while but they finally figured the hell with it, that was too expensive, and analyzed the paper six ways from Sunday. Then they started making it on their own. They’re printing this stuff like mail from Ed McMahon. Why do you think American money’s gotten so fancy all of a sudden? Office 39, that’s why. And don’t bother getting used to the new bills, because they’ll have to change again in a few years.”
Rafferty glances at his watch. “So Elson is in Bangkok because the same North Koreans who are making the American play money are also making the Thai stuff.”
“And because they pass a lot of the American counterfeits here.”
“In Bangkok? Why?”
“About the only thing they haven’t figured out is how to get tons of the stuff into the States. About three hundred thousand dollars showed up in Newark on a boat from China a year or so ago, and another seven hundred thousand got snagged in Long Beach. Peanuts, probably just trial runs. So they pass them here, or in the United Kingdom and a bunch of other countries, anywhere they can get them in by the boatload.”
“Still,” Rafferty says, “how many billion U.S. bucks are in circulation? This has got to be like putting a drop of iodine in a swimming pool.”
“People in the Bush administration referred to it as an act of war.”
“To the Bush administration, double-parking is an act of war.”
“Elson’s a Seekie,” Prettyman says. “The guys in the Service are the president’s men, remember? They tend to take the executive branch’s perspective pretty seriously. Also, here’s a chance for them to make headlines. I mean, how often does someone take a shot at the president? You can put on those suits and plug in that earpiece and scan the crowd for your whole career without ever feeling like anything except a civil servant whose feet hurt. But lookie here, a chance to put an end to an act of war.” He fingers the goatee experimentally. “So I’m telling you, don’t get in Elson’s way. He’s gonna run over you like a cement truck hitting a feather. And the Thais won’t lift a finger.”
“I think it’ll be okay. The bills came from a bank. Elson will talk to Rose’s partner, and she’ll clear the whole thing up.”
“You’d better hope so. Speaking of money.” He rolls the tube of paper back and forth beneath his palms.
“Got it,” Rafferty says. He pulls out a wad of money with a rubber band around it. “Two consultations, and what you told me you were paying your guys.” He reaches into his pocket for more. “And the twelve-five.”
“Speaking of my guys,” Prettyman says, taking the money, “they pretty much had you for breakfast yesterday.”
“You heard about that.”
“I didn’t need to hear about it. I can smell it.” He flips through the bills. “No thousands, right?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Uh-uh.” He peels off two thousand-baht bills and hands them back. “Give me five-hundreds. Last thing I need is the Seekies.”
As Rafferty makes the change, Prettyman surveys the room again. It follows the basic scheme: a square bar in the center, surrounding a raised and mirrored stage on which several scantily clad young women sleepwalk each night, more or less rhythmically. The sole distinguishing feature is at the far end of the room: three curtained booths where customers can retire with the sleepwalker of their choice for the house specialty, which requires the sleepwalker to service the seated patron for however long it takes heaven to arrive. This is exactly the kind of bar from which Rose rescued Fon.
“Thinking about an upgrade,” Prettyman says.
“Hard to imagine,” Rafferty says. “The booths are an interesting touch. Curtains and everything. Very upscale.”
“Thanks. But, you know, times change. I think maybe new lights and speakers, maybe a mirror on the stage floor. Old guys get stiff necks trying to look up all the time.”
“Next thing you know, you’ll be serving fruit shakes.”
Prettyman regards the room for another moment, eyes half narrowed to make it look better, then seems to come to a decision. “Tell me what you think of this,” he says, unfolding the paper and turning it so it faces Rafferty. It is a chalk drawing that depicts a neon sign, obviously in the design stage, with penciled measurements in meters scribbled here and there. Most of the space is taken up by a large crimson word in balloon type.
“ ‘Gulp’?” Rafferty says, reading.
“Too subtle?” Prettyman asks. He is frowning down at the page.
“It’s too a lot of things, Arnold, but subtle is not one of them. What’s wrong with ‘Charming’? That’s been the name of this place for years.”
“Fails the basic criteria of business communication,” Prettyman says.
It sounds like he’s reciting something somebody said to him. “Doesn’t tell you anything. Not memorable, not distinctive.”
“But Gulp? As in, ‘Whaddaya say, guys, let’s go down to Gulp?’ Or, ‘No problem, honey, I stopped off at Gulp?’ I don’t know, Arnold.”
Prettyman looks disconcerted. “I was thinking about calling it ‘Lewinsky’s,’ ” he says, “but somebody’s already using it.”
“It’s dated,” Rafferty says, just to mollify him. “Gulp is . . . um, timeless.” He looks down at the paper again. “But what’s with the bird?”
Prettyman studies the picture. A blue, somewhat lopsided bird with its wings outstretched hovers above the G in “Gulp.” “Nobody gets it,” he says with some bitterness.
“At least I’ve got company.” Rafferty checks his watch once more.
“You in a hurry?” Prettyman rolls up the paper with uncharacteristic vehemence.
“Come on, Arnold. Tell me about the bird. For once in your life, hand out some free information.”
“It’s a swallow,” Prettyman says shortly.
“I take it all back,” Rafferty says, rising. “You are subtle.”
!11
The Other End of the Line
wo cops,” the fourth watcher says into the cell phone. The phone is a floater, purchased, along with four others, from the people who stole them from their original owners. Each
will be used for one day. By six tonight this one will be at the bottom of the river.
Against his will, the fourth watcher yawns; he had a long night, but a yawn is an admission of weakness. “They were dragging some girl along. But here’s the interesting part: There was a guy with them. Dark suit, even a tie.”
“Thai government?” says the man on the other end of the line.
“I’m tired,” the fourth watcher admits. “I should have told you the guy in the suit was an Anglo.”
There is a pause. The fourth watcher yawns again, silently this time, and looks at the traffic. Traffic where he comes from is bad, but nothing like this. Then the man on the other end of the line says, “Shit.” He puts a lot into it.
“And since
our guy’s American, I’m figuring the guy in the suit—”
“Yeah, yeah.” The fourth watcher can almost see the other man rubbing his eyes. “Half of Thailand is following him, and now this. Cops and an American at four-thirty in the morning. What the hell is going on, Leung?”
“I just stand around and watch,” the man called Leung says. “You’re supposed to figure out what’s going on.”
“They went into the building. How do you know they went to his apartment?”
“Lights,” says the fourth watcher. “A minute, a minute and a half after they all went in, the lights went on in what I figure is the living room. Opens onto a balcony. Fifteen, twenty minutes later—make it five o’clock—they came out, all of them. Both cops, the Anglo, and the woman. About thirty seconds after that, the lights in the apartment went off again.”
“Where are you now?”
“Sex city. Nana Plaza. Our guy just went inside, into a bar.”
“At this hour? With a woman like that at home, he’s doing a morning quickie?”
“Bar’s closed,” says Leung. “Some Anglo guy showed up and unlocked it for him.”
“Describe him.”
“Only saw him for a second. Balding and combing it forward, little-bitty features in a big face. Oh, and a goatee. Got maybe twenty pounds he doesn’t want, mostly around his belt.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Any followers on our man?”
“Not unless they’re invisible.”
“Okay,” the man on the other end of the line says. “Wait a few minutes until Ming Li shows up, and then come on in and get some sleep. She’ll take him for the rest of the day.”
Leung stifles another yawn. “Three or four tails practically riding on his back all the time. Cops in the middle of the night. A guy who couldn’t be any more government if he had an eagle on his jacket. What do you think it is?”
“I think it’s the same thing you do,” says the man on the other end of the phone. “Trouble.”
!12
A Yellow Heart
he go-go clubs of Nana Plaza, where Prettyman’s bar is located, don’t light up until 6:00 p.m., but the open-air bars flanking the end of the Plaza that spills into Soi Nana are
already packed at 10:30 in the morning and exuding an air of desperate fun. The tables are jammed with drinkers, some of whom can barely sit upright and most of whom look as though they haven’t been to bed in days: Bags sag beneath eyes, graying whiskers bristle, hair as lank as raw bacon hangs over foreheads. Trembling hands hoist glasses. Here and there, Rafferty sees a morning-shift girl, her arms draped around one of the drinkers, looking at him as though he’s just emerged, naked, gleaming, and perfect, from the sea.
Bad 1980s rock and roll, big-hair metal at its most aggressively ordinary, elbows its way onto the sidewalk. The as-yet-unclaimed women, who will be doing short-times until 7:00 p.m., hug the stools they’ve staked out, their miniskirts riding up over their thighs as they scan the crowd in the hope of intercepting a speculative glance. Most of them aren’t even pretending to be interested. It’s too early.
Rafferty knows exactly how they feel. Thanks to the visit from Elson and Rose’s nervousness afterward, he got maybe ninety minutes of sleep. His eyes feel like someone poured a handful of sand beneath his lids, and there’s something sluggish and heavy at his core. He knows there’s only one cure: coffee. The question is whether to go home and drink a pot with Rose or grab some here. He’s thickheaded enough that his indecision actually stops him in the middle of the sidewalk. One of the girls in the bar, seeing him pause, calls him in. For a moment he considers it—they’ve got coffee—but the music and the clientele combine to create a richly textured awfulness that’s better avoided at this hour. The light level drops slightly, and he looks up to see some truly alarming clouds.
Can he even make it home before the rain hits?
He is turning to walk to Sukhumvit Road when he sees the girl.
She instantly stops and drops to one knee to fiddle with a shoe, lowering her head so a veil of black hair falls forward and covers her features. In the half second or so that he sees her, however, the face leaps across the darkening day as though a flashbulb has exploded. She is extraordinarily beautiful. Her pale face is angular, sharp-boned, almost unnaturally symmetrical. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Not Thai. Chinese, perhaps, or even Korean, although something about her features—the high bridge of her nose, the curve of her lower lip—suggests she might be hasip-hasip, fifty-fifty Western. But the thing that arrests his gaze is that there is something familiar about her. He knows he has never seen her before. He would remember if he had; she is definitely material for the memory bank. But he recognizes something in her face.
He is still staring at her when she glances up from her shoe and catches his eye. She gives him a sliver of a smile, more the thought of a smile than the thing itself, and then stands and walks away, her back to him, heading back up Soi Nana. He is certain she just reversed direction. As she retreats, he sees that she is taller than most Asian women, perhaps five-eight, another reason to think she might be hasip-hasip.
Not as tall as Rose, he thinks, and a bolt of guilt pierces him. He should be doing something—anything—about Agent Elson. And Fon, if he can; for all he knows, Fon is still in jail. The first thing that comes to mind is the two cops who were with Elson. He pulls out the phone again, turns it on, and dials the number of his friend Arthit, a colonel in the Bangkok police. As he waits for the ring, he turns back in the direction of Sukhumvit and begins to amble toward it. Arthit’s voice mail picks up, and Rafferty leaves a message, asking whether they can meet for lunch in a couple of hours at an outdoor restaurant near Arthit’s station.
He snaps the phone shut and asks himself again: home or somewhere here?
His decision arrives in the form of a typical Thai raindrop, perhaps half a pint of warm water, that smacks the top of his forehead much as a Zen master might clobber a meditating student whose attention has wandered. Before he can blink, thunder rumbles and the sky flickers: lights on, off, then on again, and suddenly it’s much darker than before. A giant burps high overhead, a noise like someone rolling cannonballs in a huge pan. Rafferty has learned respect for Thai rainstorms, which can empty an Olympic swimming pool on one’s head in a matter of minutes, and he hurries toward the intersection, hoping to flag a tuktuk before the deluge strikes.
Hope, as is so often the case, is disappointed. Poke hasn’t gone ten yards before the drain opens in heaven, tons of water falling, the drops so fat and heavy that their splashes reach his knees. A whiplash of light precedes by scant seconds a sound like the sky cracking in half. The rain increases in volume, slapping his shoulders sharply enough to sting. His world shrinks to a circle a few yards wide with himself at its soaked center. It is literally impossible to see across the street.
Rain means the same thing in what the tour books call “exotic Bangkok” that it means in more prosaic cities around the world. It means that there will not be a taxi within miles. It means Rafferty could stand on the curb for hours, stark naked, painted fuchsia, and waving a million-baht note, and no one would hit the brakes. It means he has a chance to find out whether his new jeans are really preshrunk or just Bangkok preshrunk, meaning that some seamstress spent several minutes painstakingly sewing on a label that says “preshrunk,” which is usually the item that shrinks first.
He’s running by now, the phone folded and sheltered in his fist, looking for a restaurant, coffee shop, bar—anyplace he can wait out the rain. As if on cue, golden lights bloom to his right, haloed in the rain. A bell rings as he pushes his way through the door, into a small bakery and coffee shop. He is alone, facing a long glass case full of pastries frosted in an improbable yellow the color of Barbie’s hair. The air is thick with coffee, and stools line the window, framing a gray rectangle of rain. He takes a seat and drips contentedly onto the floor, watching the water fall.
As a native of California, where a cloudy day makes
the TV news, Rafferty is thrilled by Thailand’s enormous weather. Its sheer magnitude seems a kind of wealth, spending itself extravagantly day after day: thunderous rain, blinding heat, clouds as greasy and dark as oil shale. Nothing makes him happier than being in his apartment with Miaow, all the lights on in midafternoon, as monsoon-force winds lash the rain around and rattle the glass door to the balcony.
And now Rose will be there, too. As his wife.
The lie he told Rose in bed that morning nags at him. In fact, he had tried to find his father. Within two weeks of his graduation from UCLA, he had returned to Lancaster and ransacked his father’s metal box. Two days later he was on a plane to Hong Kong. Once there, he used the decades-old names and addresses he had copied into his notebook to track his father across China, where he ultimately found the woman—fat and blowsy now—for whose decades-old memory Frank Rafferty had left his wife and son behind.
His father had refused to see him.
The only thing Rafferty owes his father is that the search had brought him to Asia, where he has been more or less ever since.
Frank has a yellow heart, his fierce mother had said, the one time she allowed Rafferty to raise the subject of his father’s disappearance. At the time he’d thought she meant he was a coward. Only after he realized that he, too, had a yellow heart did he grasp that his father simply loved Asia, could not live anywhere but Asia. Rafferty’s mother, half Filipina herself, had understood her husband, although that didn’t stop her from hating him later, with that special talent for hatred that Filipinos carry in their blood, mixed in with gaiety and music.
A yellow heart, he thinks.
“Sawadee, kha,” someone says behind him. He turns to see a girl, perhaps ten years old. She wears a pair of shorts more or less the same yellow as the pastries behind the glass and a much-laundered T-shirt that says happy together above a picture of two fat hippies whom Rafferty recognizes as the singers in an old-time band called the Turtles. She is as brown as a paper bag.
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