PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Sawadee, khrap,” Rafferty says. “Caffee lon, okay?”

  “One hot coffee,” Happy Together says. “It will coming up.” She looks past him at the rain, and her lips move experimentally. Then she narrows her eyes and takes the plunge. “Have raining, yes?”

  “Have raining, yes,” Rafferty says. “Have raining mak-mak.” The Thai phrase for “a lot.”

  “Hokay,” Happy Together says proudly. “Talking English, na?”

  “More or less. You speak it well.”

  “Ho, no,” she says. “Only little bit.” It sounds like “leeten bit.” “Where you come from?”

  “U.S.A.”

  She raises an index finger as though she is going to lecture him, but the message is mathematical. She says, “U.S.A. numbah one.”

  “No,” Rafferty says. “Thailand is number one.”

  “Hah.” Her grin is enormously white. He has passed the national test. “Caffee lon now.” She disappears behind the counter, only the top of her head visible. She is no taller than Miaow.

  Miaow, he thinks. Miaow is Rafferty’s family now. Rose is Rafferty’s family now. It has taken him years to assemble a home, and now he has one. I’m really hasip-hasip now, he thinks. I have a Thai family. With his mother’s Filipina blood evident in the high bones of his face and his straight black hair, he has often been mistaken for half Thai, although he’s only one-quarter Asian. Still, he thinks, he’s genetically entitled to his yellow heart.

  The coffee, when it is slapped down in front of him, is thick enough to whip. He lifts the heavy china mug and stares at the rain.

  “Think too much,” Happy Together says, standing beside him. “Think too much, no good.”

  “Thinking about good things,” Rafferty says. “I’ve got a little girl at home just like you.”

  “Thai girl?” Happy Together gives the operatic rain a disdainful glance. She’s used to it.

  “One hundred percent,” Rafferty says.

  Happy Together glances at his face, looks again. “You, what? Hasiphasip?”

  “Part Filipino.”

  “I know where Pipinenes are,” she says, pointing more or less east. “Over there.” It comes out “Oweh dah.”

  “My daughter’s smart, too.”

  She thinks for a second, pushing her lower lip out. “Some farang no have baby, right?”

  “Right.” He has been asked this question before. Most Thais cannot imagine an adult choosing not to have children.

  “Why? Why not have baby? No have baby, not happy.”

  “I don’t know. But you’re right. Babies are necessary.”

  Happy Together fills her cheeks with air as she checks the dictionary in her head and then squints at him. “You say what?”

  “Necessary,” Rafferty repeats, following it with the Thai word.

  “Word too big,” she says decisively.

  “Not for you. You’re smart.”

  She goes up on tiptoes. “You know twelve times twelve?”

  “One hundred thirty-eight.”

  “Ho.” She punches him on the leg, hard enough to raise a lump. “You joking me.”

  “See how smart you are? And look, you’ve already got your own shop.”

  She balls her fist to punch him again and thinks better of it. Maybe her hand hurts. “My mama make shop. But I make caffee. Good, na?”

  “Excellent.” Rafferty brings the cup to his lips and watches as someone comes into sight through the window, shrouded in rain. A woman, her clothes pasted to her slender form. She does not keep her head down against the downpour but shields her eyes with a hand, obviously looking for something or someone. He watches idly for a moment, wondering why she hasn’t ducked inside to wait out the storm, and then, with a start, realizes who she is.

  He pushes back his stool. “How many baht?” he asks Happy Together.

  “Twenty. Caffee no good?”

  The girl has passed from sight. So he was right; she had reversed direction, then turned around and followed him again. “It’s excellent,” he says. “But I just saw someone I know.” He gives Happy Together a bright blue fifty-baht note and hurries out into the rain.

  THE MOMENT HE sets foot on the street, a sheet of lightning flattens everything, turning the raindrops ice-white and freezing them in midfall. The boom that follows feels like his own skull crumpling. He starts walking, as fast as he can without breaking into a run, waiting for the girl’s form to solidify through the gray curtain in front of him.

  He had meant to tell Prettyman to call off the trackers. He decided over his morning coffee to drop the book idea as too risky for someone with a wife and child, kicking off the first day of his new life with a firm resolve that made him feel briefly adult, despite a twinge of resentment; the book’s topic had interested him. But now things were different. He had responsibilities. He’d write magazine articles. He’d review books—that sounded safe. Maybe he’d do advertising copy.

  The prospect had all the allure of a glass of warm milk, but his wife and daughter would be happier. He and Rose would economize; they’d pay Miaow’s tuition, and then worry about everything else. He’d left the apartment with every intention of abandoning the project. Then he had been distracted, thinking about the conversation about Elson, and he’d forgotten to tell Prettyman he was quitting.

  Or perhaps, he acknowledges, he likes the excitement. Or maybe he doesn’t want to let go of the advance money.

  But now he can clear it up.

  He passes a drugstore, a restaurant, a small hotel, a hair salon full of women anxiously lining the window, staring at the rain that will ruin their new hairdos, barely paid for. Cars splash by in the street, throwing up sheets of water three feet high. The light increases by several f-stops, and he realizes the rain is lifting. He can see half a block ahead now.

  The girl is nowhere in sight.

  He breaks into a run, his feet slapping through the water. Then some giant hand turns off the faucet and the rain stops, as suddenly as it began. The boulevard yawns in front of him, gleaming wet, its sidewalk almost deserted.

  She must have turned into a side street. He looks back, certain he didn’t pass one, and sees nothing. Half a block ahead, though, a tuktuk fords a temporary lake across the boulevard and vanishes to the right, obviously heading down a soi. Without breaking stride, Rafferty chases it and enters the soi.

  And sees her, walking briskly, almost a block away. She turns, checking behind her, and spots him. At the same moment, she sees the tuktuk and raises a hand to flag it. The tuk-tuk swerves suicidally to the curb, its driver having obviously seen her face, and she climbs in. As it pulls away, she looks back at Rafferty again. Then, with that same quarter smile, she lifts her hand and waves good-bye.

  !13

  My Sweetness Is Classified

  magazine article.

  His notebook is pocket-size, awkward for anything

  but brief reminders, but he scribbles in it anyway, sitting at the outdoor table until the rain drives him inside. “Spytown,” he titles it, ten thousand, maybe fifteen thousand words about the oddly matched collection of spies who, like Prettyman, drifted to Bangkok when the world no longer looked like it was heading for a shooting war. He’d met a few of them. His second conversation with Prettyman had taken place in a bar so discreet it didn’t even have a sign. Rafferty had needed half an hour, trekking up and down the soi on foot, to find it, and when he went inside, it was full of spies.

  Well, retired spies, or so they said. Now older and fatter, they looked like traveling salesmen whose territories had shrunk out from under them. There was something unanchored about them, something about the way their eyes checked the room without settling on anything, the way they looked at every face twice, and then twice again, that was unnerving. They seemed always to be reassuring themselves that they had an exit, from the room, from the conversation. Rafferty had heard it said that the only people who were at home everywhere were kings and prostitutes. These men were on th
e other end of the scale. They weren’t at home anywhere.

  All of them were men. They congregated in the booths in groups that assembled and broke up constantly, rehashing operations from twenty years ago, operations on which they’d been on opposing sides. It quickly became apparent that half the men in the bar would have killed the other half on sight in 1985.

  Nineteen eighty-five: the year his father had returned to China.

  Prettyman had been different in the bar. Rafferty is trying to capture the difference in words when he notices that the rain has stopped again, and he grabs his coffee and his notebook and moves back outside. Arthit will be able to see him better out there, and the air-conditioning on his wet clothing has given him a chill.

  A waitress mops the table, but Rafferty, eager to write, sits before she tends to his chair, which has half an inch of water gathered in the low point of the seat. He barely notices, seeing in his mind’s eye the loose, confident way Prettyman moved in the bar, as though he were outdoors and in familiar terrain. Until then Prettyman had always struck Rafferty as someone who navigated the world too carefully, the kind of person who checks frequently to make sure the top is screwed tightly on the salt shaker.

  Arnold had been in his element in the bar. As Rafferty was when he was writing the kind of material he enjoyed writing.

  “Stop that,” he says out loud. He starts to write again, thinking he might have to reevaluate Arnold. The man in the spies’ bar was more formidable than the vaguely comic ex-spook he thought he knew. Suddenly he realizes he’s been patronizing Arnold.

  He stops writing, the point of his pen still touching the page.

  “Doing a Raymond Chandler?” someone asks, and Rafferty looks up to see Arthit peering down at the notebook.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Chandler wrote on little pieces of paper,” Arthit says, pulling out a chair. “About the size of a paperback book. The trick, he said, was to get a tiny bit of magic on every one of those little pages.”

  “Is that so?” Rafferty watches Arthit’s expression as his bottom hits the miniature pond on the seat. After his friend’s eyes have widened

  rewardingly, Rafferty says, “The seat’s wet.”

  “I know,” Arthit says through his teeth. “It’s very cooling.”

  “And how does that piece of information about Raymond Chandler come to be in the possession of a Bangkok policeman?”

  “Chandler went to Dulwich, my school in England,” Arthit says. “He was the only famous graduate who interested me, so I read about him. He drank too much. Why do writers drink too much?”

  “They’re alone too much.”

  “Why don’t you drink too much?”

  “I more or less live in a permanent crowd. How’s Noi?”

  “She hurts,” Arthit says. “It comes and goes. Lately it mostly comes.” Arthit’s wife, Noi, whom he loves without reservation, is taking a defiant stand against multiple sclerosis. She’s two years into the battle now, and despite all the medicine, herbal remedies, prayer, and love, she’s losing. Arthit slides back and forth on the seat and then lifts himself a couple of inches and glares down at the wet chair. “She’d love to see you and Rose.”

  “Is tomorrow night okay?”

  “That’s what I like about Americans,” Arthit says in his best British-inflected English. “They take small talk literally.” He resigns himself to being wet and settles in. He’s wearing his uniform, natty brown police duds stretched tight over broad shoulders and a hard little bowling ball of a belly. Arthit gives the cop’s eye to the other people in the outdoor café, and they either look away or return it with wary curiosity. Bangkok cops have worked hard to earn their reputation for unpredictability.

  “So here’s the bad news,” Arthit continues as a waitress materializes to hover politely above them. Arthit waves her off. “If this Elson is who he says he is, you’re not going to get much help from my shop. Counterfeiting is a problem we actually share. The Secret Service gets carte blanche.”

  “Wow,” Rafferty says. “Bilingual.”

  “I don’t want to leave you out of the conversation,” Arthit says, “so let me put it another way. As far as my bosses are concerned, these guys shit silver.”

  “A minute ago, when you were still speaking English, you said that was the bad news. That usually implies that there’s also good news.”

  Arthit starts to put an elbow on the table and thinks better of it. “The good news is that this is a big deal. The Secret Service didn’t come to Bangkok to bust maids. They’re looking for a source, and we both know that Rose and— What’s her name?”

  “Peachy.”

  Arthit’s mouth tightens in distaste. “Self-named, no doubt.”

  “Seems like a safe bet.”

  “They’re probably not passing out millions, are they? Your Mr. Elson will backtrack it to the bank, and that’ll be it.”

  “That’s pretty much what I told Rose.”

  Arthit leans back in his chair and folds his hands over his belly. “Then why are you bothering me?”

  “Just an excuse to get together. And I figured, this being a day of rest for ordinary mortals, that you’d be rattling around, bored senseless, and looking for something to do. Instead here you are, all suited up and spit-shined.”

  “You may have heard that we’ve had a coup,” Arthit says. “When people wake up and see tanks in the streets and then learn they’ve got a new government—one they didn’t elect—the police find themselves putting in a lot of overtime. The official line is that our presence is reassuring, although you and I know that having a whole bunch of cops all over the place all of a sudden is a pretty effective implied threat.”

  “If they only knew how sweet you actually are.”

  “My sweetness is classified. And if it were to become public knowledge, it would no doubt be blamed on the former prime minister.” Arthit does a quick local survey to make sure no one is listening. “As part of the never-ending effort to find something else to blame on the former prime minister.”

  “I’d have thought the airport would satisfy anyone.” In the wake of the coup, the sparkling new Suvarnabhumi International Airport has been found to be quite literally falling apart. “Cracked runways, no bathrooms, leaking roofs. Sagging Jetways. Should be enough corruption there to keep everybody’s pointing finger busy for a couple of years.”

  “As a loyal servant of the Thai government,” Arthit says, “I prefer to think of the problem as one of misplaced optimism. We Thais have a sunny turn of mind. Who but optimists would build an airport on a piece of land called Cobra Swamp? Even if one ignores the cobras, the word ‘swamp’ should have given someone pause.”

  “They probably paused long enough to buy it,” Rafferty says. “Somebody sold that land to the government. Of course, it’ll probably turn out to have been the former prime minister.”

  Arthit glances at his watch. “As much as I’m enjoying sitting here in this nice, wet chair and chatting with you about the state of the nation, I’ve got things to do. But before I go, I want to make sure that you took my larger meaning, which I implied with all the Asian subtlety at my command. Do not do anything to anger Agent Elson.”

  “That’s pretty much what Arnold Prettyman said.”

  “Arnold’s good at survival,” Arthit says.

  “How’s Fon? Is there anything I can do for her?”

  “She’s fine,” Arthit says. “Nothing severe, just sitting in a cell with the two other girls who deposited Peachy’s money, talking up a storm. How do women do that? They’ve known each other for years, and sometimes two of them are talking at once. Don’t women ever run out of things to say?”

  “My guess is that they’re sort of furnishing the cell,” Rafferty says. “They’re in an uncongenial environment, probably feeling threatened, so they fill it up with words and feelings until it’s more comfortable.”

  “Aren’t you Mr. Sensitivity?” Arthit says. “Anyway, they’ll proba
bly get out on Monday, when the banks open.”

  “Not until then?”

  “Probably not. Your Mr. Elson seems to be a bit of a hardnose.”

  “That’s what worries me. Rose says he enjoys power too much.”

  “Rose is a good Buddhist.” Arthit checks his watch again.

  “Arthit,” Rafferty says. He pauses, looking for a way to frame it, and then plunges straight in. “Rose said yes.”

  Arthit looks at him blankly. “In a vacuum? When she was by herself? Was there a question involved?”

  “I asked her to marry me.” Even now he can feel his pulse accelerate.

  Arthit’s smile seems to reach all the way to his hairline. “And she said yes?”

  “Believe it or not.”

  Arthit reaches over and pats Rafferty’s hand. “Noi will be so happy.” He gets up and pushes his chair back. “See what I mean? We Thais are optimists.”

  RAFFERTY HAS BEEN writing for fifteen minutes, working on his magazine story with a certain amount of guilty enjoyment, when the first one hits. It strikes him in the temple, hard enough to brighten the day for a heartbeat. For one absurd, soul-shriveling tenth of a second, he thinks he is dead, and in that transparent slice of time he forms two complete thoughts. The first is a question—Will I hear the shot before I die?—and the second is a statement—I will never marry Rose. And then the world does not end, and he glances down to see the small black ball that is rolling back and forth at his feet, smooth and gleaming, about the size of a large marble.

  A chill at his temple brings his fingers up, and they come away wet. Whatever the fluid is, it is clear. So at least he’s not bleeding. He touches the tip of his tongue to his finger. Sweet.

  The restaurant has filled now that the rain is gone, but no one seems to have noticed anything. Since the world has not ended, time continues to flow. Traffic creeps by on the boulevard uninterrupted.

  Rafferty looks for the source of the missile. No eyes are turned his way, so he bends and picks up the little ball. He is holding the pit of a fresh lychee nut, from which someone has just gnawed the sugary pulp. Hard as a marble, although not exactly a lethal weapon. But what produces that kind of accuracy—some sort of blowgun?