PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  NINETY MINUTES AND three cell-phone shops later, Rose has heard approximately ten thousand words from Miaow on cell phones in general, how they can play music, how great the games are, how much safer she’ll be with one, and—above all—an encyclopedic disquisition on text messages: They’re cool, they’re cheap, and all her friends send them all the time. Rose’s comment that she thought Miaow’s friends spent at least some of their time at school didn’t create a pause long enough to slip a comma into. Now, as Miaow works her thumbs on the touch pad of her new phone, so fast that Rose can’t see them move, Rose fishes through her bag and realizes she left her own phone at home. She borrows Miaow’s, after waiting until the child finishes keying in the third act of Macbeth or whatever it is, and dials Rafferty’s number. His phone, Rose learns, is not in service, which means he has turned it off. She hands the phone back to Miaow, who immediately polishes it on her T-shirt.

  “I’ll send this one to you,” Miaow says, doing the thumbs thing again. “It’ll be on your phone when we get home.”

  “Which is where we should go,” Rose says. “Poke will be there soon. When he’s all alone, he breaks things.”

  Miaow finishes punching at the keys and then checks the shine on the phone. She uses the front of her T-shirt to rub at a stubborn spot. “Let’s go to Foodland,” she says. “Let’s buy him a steak.” She flips the phone open again. “I can call Foodland and see if they have steak.”

  “They have steak,” Rose says. “I was going to make noodles with duck and green onions.”

  “Poke’s American,” Miaow says. “He eats anything, but he always wants steak.”

  “Poor baby. He tries so hard. Do you remember the night I gave him a thousand-year egg?” Thousand-year eggs, which found their way to Thailand via China, are not really a thousand years old, but they might as well be. They’re black, hard, and as sulfurous as a high-school chemistry experiment. Rose starts to laugh. “Did you see his face?”

  Miaow is laughing, too. “And how many times he swallowed?” She mimes someone trying desperately to get something down.

  “Like it was trying to climb back up again,” Rose says, and the two of them stand in the middle of the sidewalk laughing, with Miaow hanging on to Rose’s hand as though without it she’d dissolve into a pool on the sidewalk.

  “You’re right,” Rose says, wiping her eyes. “If I’m going to be his wife, I should feed him a steak once in a while.”

  “He wants to be Thai,” Miaow says, and Rose, startled, meets her eyes. Then the two of them start laughing again.

  IT IS ALMOST SEVEN by the time they step off the elevator, dragging the bags that contain at least one of practically everything Foodland had on discount: shampoo, bleach, detergent, toothpaste, toilet paper, four place mats, two stuffed penguins, five pairs of underpants for Poke (who doesn’t wear underpants), a baby blanket because it was pink, a flower vase, some flowers to put in it, and five porterhouse steaks. As the elevator doors open, Rose says, “We saved a fortune,” and then the two of them stop dead at what looks at first like a pile of wrinkled clothes someone has thrown against the door to the apartment.

  But then the pile of clothes stirs, and Peachy looks up at them.

  This is a Peachy whom Rose has never seen before. Her lacquered hair is snarled and tangled, her face blotchy where the powder has been wiped away. Two long tracks of mascara trail down her cheeks.

  “That man,” she begins, and then starts to sob. “That—that American—”

  Rose drops the bags and hurries to her, takes both of her hands, and brings her to her feet. As Peachy straightens, a crinkled brown paper shopping bag, crimped closed at the top, tumbles from her lap to the floor, and Peachy jumps back from it as though it were a cobra.

  “It’s okay,” Rose says. “Poke says it’ll be okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” Peachy says. “It’s the end of the world.” She points a trembling finger at the paper bag, and Rose squats down and opens it.

  And stares down into it, still as stone.

  Then she says, in English, “Oh, my God.”

  !16

  I Don’t Know What “Usual” Means to You

  he’s your sister,” Frank says. “Say hello, Ming Li.” From beside Frank, Ming Li says, deadpan, “Hello,

  Ming Li.” She sounds as if she finds nothing out of the ordinary, as if meeting her half brother for the first time in an abandoned garage, after she’s had someone cave his head in and he’s tried to assault their father, is nothing to get ruffled about.

  Rafferty is pinned to the chair again, his hands cuffed behind him. His launch toward his father had been aborted by Leung’s hand grabbing his shirt. He’d belly flopped on the cement floor, gasping for breath with the chair flat on its back behind him, as the Chinese man snapped the cuffs back on, set the chair upright, and plopped Rafferty into it as though he were no heavier than a puppy. Leung is a lot faster than Rafferty.

  “I should have known,” Rafferty says. He’s so angry at himself he feels like spitting in his own lap. “She looks as much like you as it’s possible for a beautiful Asian woman to look.”

  “Looks like you, too,” Frank says. “It’s the bone structure.” He is sitting in a chair about a yard away from Rafferty, his face haloed by a fringe of white hair. Ming Li stands beside him, a pale hand resting on his shoulder.

  Rafferty regards Ming Li, who gives him a cool downward gaze. “You and I don’t look alike,” he says to Frank.

  Frank shrugs. “You may not want my bone structure,” he says, “but you’ve got it.”

  “I hope that’s all we’ve got in common.”

  Frank pushes his chair back a couple of inches. “Why don’t we postpone all that for now? Recriminations and hurt feelings and so forth. It’s not very appealing under the best of circumstances, and these aren’t them. I’ve kept up with you, Poke—from a distance, obviously. I’ve read your books, checked into what you’re up to here in Bangkok. You’re making a nice life for yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Checked how?”

  Frank shrugs again. “Usual channels.” Except for a slight stoop, a lot of missing hair, and that shuffling walk, he looks surprisingly like the man Rafferty remembers from all those years ago. He has to be in his seventies, but time has barely laid a glove on him. It strikes Rafferty for the hundredth time that serenity and selfishness aren’t that dissimilar. They both keep people young. His mother, even with her Filipina blood, has aged much more than his father has.

  Rafferty says, “I don’t know what ‘usual’ means to you. I don’t know anything about you at all. And I didn’t get much help from that woman in Shanghai—”

  “Ming Li’s mother,” Frank says evenly.

  “—from Ming Li’s mother. And of course you couldn’t be bothered, could you? You were busy or something.”

  “I was impressed you’d found us.”

  “Well, that makes me feel warm all over. Imagine what a home run it would have been if you’d said it in person.” He shifts in the chair. “You can take the cuffs off.”

  “You’re sure?” Frank seems amused, and Rafferty realizes he has seen precisely the same expression on Ming Li’s face.

  “It was an impulse. It’s passed. I’d still like to bust you one, but you’re safe in front of your daughter.”

  Ming Li laughs, and after a long moment Frank joins her. “Go ahead,” she says. “Hit him. Frank gets hit a lot.”

  “I’d imagine.”

  “Get the cuffs off, Leung. He’s going to be nice.” Frank watches as Leung emerges from the shadows to move behind Rafferty and free his wrists.

  “Another of yours?” Poke rubs his hands together to restore circulation.

  “No. He has the misfortune to be a friend.”

  “No problem,” Leung says. He twirls the cuffs around his index finger. He has high Tibetan cheekbones, narrow eyes of a startlingly pale brown, and a wide mouth that smiles easily, although the smile does not make him look
any more cheerful. For all the effect it has on his eyes, it might as well be on someone else’s face.

  Rafferty looks at Leung’s smiling, cheerless expression and recognizes one of the people who don’t like other humans because they’ve seen too much of them. This is the group from which professional killers are recruited. “Aside from all the obvious reasons,” Rafferty asks, “why is it a misfortune to be your friend?”

  “Well,” Frank says, shifting on his seat. It is a hedge, and for a moment Rafferty feels satisfaction at his father’s discomfort. “That’s what we have to talk about.”

  “YOU LIVE RATHER publicly,” Frank says. There is a damped disapproval in his tone.

  Even at six-thirty on this Saturday evening, the restaurant is crowded with Thais in large groups, wet and noisily merry as though the warm rain, which has begun again, is a personal joke. When they entered, Frank had said something into the ear of the woman who greeted them, and she’d shown them to a small booth against the back wall, where they can see the entire room and hear each other without shouting. They had made the trip in two tuk-tuks—Frank, Ming Li, and Rafferty riding silently in the first and Leung solo in the second. Covering their backs, Rafferty figures.

  “I’ve got no reason to sneak around,” Rafferty says.

  Frank turns over a reasonable palm. “Just an observation, Poke. In Bangkok—hell, in Asia—information is money. No need to make it so accessible.”

  “For me, money is money. Information is just information.” The booth is a tight fit. Rafferty is jammed next to Leung, who had come in a few minutes after them and then scanned the room, as objective as a metal detector, before joining them. Rafferty can smell Leung’s wet clothes, cigarettes, and a hair oil that owes a distant debt to bay rum. Pressing up against Rafferty’s hip is a hard object in Leung’s pocket that Rafferty assumes is a gun, which means that at least two of the three in Frank’s party are packing. Ming Li sits beside Frank, surveying Poke with a curiosity she had not displayed in the garage. Even dripping water she is beautiful.

  “You never know what the local currency is,” Frank is saying. “The first time I saw the little girl I thought, whoops, the boy’s a twist, where did I go wrong? But you were so public with her. The real twists don’t like daylight. And then, of course, I saw the woman. What’s her name again?”

  Rafferty does not reply.

  “Rose, right? Amazingly beautiful, isn’t she? Very reassuring, knowing you’ve got taste like that.”

  “I assume there’s more to this miraculous reappearance than a sudden need to express approval of my life.”

  Frank lifts a cup of coffee and puts it down untouched. Poke is startled to see the age spots on the back of his hand. “At your age, Poke, you shouldn’t still be harping on all that. I know it’s fashionable in America for adults to blame their parents for everything they did or didn’t do, but the general feeling here is, get over it. One more example of the wisdom of the East.”

  “Gee, I don’t know.” Rafferty turns his eyes to Ming Li. “Give me some of the wisdom of the East. You’re half qualified. Let’s suppose one day—two days after Christmas, as it turns out—old Frank here just took a walk. Went out to buy a pound of rice and some dried shrimp and never came back. Left you and your mother flat, hopped a plane across the Pacific. Didn’t even bother to say, ‘Hey, good-bye, see you later, take care of your mom, kid.’ ”

  “My mother can take care of herself,” Ming Li says. “If she couldn’t, she’d be dead.”

  “Oh, that’s right, I forgot. He left her, too, didn’t he? Sort of a leitmotif, isn’t it? Like background music. ‘Frank’s Theme.’”

  Something flickers in Ming Li’s eyes. “He came back.”

  “And you’re . . . what? Nineteen, twenty?”

  “Twenty-two,” she says. “Frank looks young for his age, and so do I. You, too, actually.” Her long fingers are curled around a cup of tea.

  “You work fast,” Rafferty says to Frank.

  “It would have been faster, but China’s a big place,” Frank says. “I had to find my wife first.”

  The babble of conversation in the restaurant stumbles up against one of those mysterious group pauses, and Poke says, into the silence, “Your wife was in fucking Lancaster, California.”

  “My first wife,” Frank says placidly.

  The words seem to shrink the booth and squeeze them all closer to one another, and Rafferty pushes himself back against the padding to find some distance, keeping his face empty. “Ah. Gosh, I guess we’re finally having that father-son chat.”

  “I met her when she was twelve years old.” Frank ignores Poke’s tone. “She was washing sheets in a brothel in Shanghai.”

  “I don’t really want to know,” Rafferty says, thinking, Twelve?

  “And I don’t really give a good goddamn whether you want to know. I’m telling you because I have to.” He has leaned forward sharply, his hands curved stiffly around the perimeter of his saucer, and the coffee slops onto his left hand as the cup slides forward. If it burns, he ignores it. “You need to understand what’s going on, because it involves you now.”

  “And you need to understand something, too. If you’ve done anything that’s going to fuck with my life here, especially at this point, I’m going to grind you to paste.” He wills his spine to relax and adds, “Dad.”

  Frank wipes the liquid from the back of his hand and lifts the coffee to sip at it, raising one finger—wait—as though Rafferty has politely expressed interest. “She’d been there—in the brothel, I mean—since she was ten. Just tidying up and stuff, not working yet. Sold by her family, of course, but I suppose you know all about that, considering what you write about. I had business with the guys who ran the place—I had given myself a crash course in accounting, and I did their books—and she took care of me when I was there, brought me tea. A couple of times, she massaged my feet. A really sweet, exquisitely beautiful kid.”

  Rafferty tries, and fails, to match this description to the woman he had met in Shanghai.

  “She learned my name,” Frank says, “although she couldn’t pronounce it for shit. But it meant something to me to hear her say it.” He catches his upper lip between his teeth and then blows out, so hard it ripples the surface of his coffee. “Anyway, the time came for her to make her debut. So to speak. At the age of twelve.” Leung is turned away from Rafferty, watching the room. Ming Li listens impassively, as though they are talking about someone she does not know. She runs the tip of her right index finger over the blunt-cut nails of her left hand as though thinking about pulling out an emery board.

  “So I bought her,” Frank says. “I bought her for her first week, before some asshole could jerk off into her and then forget her. She’d never forget it, of course. It would have been the beginning of her life as a whore.” He dips his head as though in apology. “One of those moments when someone else’s life changes forever, and I was just standing there with my hands in my pockets. So I bought her for a week. I gave her a place to sleep. I fed her. I got her some nice clothes. I left her alone at night, obviously. She was a child. It was a typically stupid Westerner’s gesture, Don Quixote to the rescue, putting a Band-Aid on an amputation. Great, she had a week before the machine took its first bite out of her, and she’d be different forever.”

  “It was a good thing to do,” Ming Li says.

  He lifts a hand and rests it briefly on her shoulder. Ming Li leans against it and produces her fractional smile. “But it was pointless. I thought about it every night she was in my house. Kept me awake all night long. You know, I’d seen hundreds of whores in Asia—everybody from the top-level courtesans to the saltwater sisters who accommodated sailors against the walls of the alleys around the harbor. And of course lots of kids—twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. Shanghai was the commercial sex capital of the world then. I was surrounded by prostitutes, and not just in my professional capacity. But I hadn’t seen one at that moment, the moment when her real lif
e ended, when she became something else. So I made a commitment. When it was time to take her back, I didn’t. I stole her.”

  Rafferty has no idea what to say, so he doesn’t.

  “Well, that created a fuss.” Frank is watching Leung watch the room. “As I said, I’d been doing the books for the brothel, one in a chain. All short-time stuff, just in and out, so to speak. Today they’d probably call it McSex. The firm I was working for, very proper and British in public, was really Chinese-owned, and it was on retainer for every triad in Shanghai. So I had some insight into how the system worked. I bought her for a second week, just to get a head start, and then we took off.”

  “You should write a book,” Rafferty says, but he is interested in spite of himself.

  “I’m in enough trouble already.” His eyes flick away. “Anything happening, Leung?”

  “Only cops,” Leung says.

  “Where?” Rafferty doesn’t see any uniforms.

  “Table near the door. Three of them. Plainclothes. You can tell by the phones.”

  Sure enough, black boxy things with short antennae. “I’m impressed.”

  “Leung earns his keep,” Frank says.

  “I work cheap,” Leung says, and laughs. Then he says to Frank, “Back door?”

  “Through the kitchen,” Frank says, lifting his chin half an inch in the direction of a swinging door behind Leung. It is a very Chinese gesture.

  Leung nods and lets his back touch the upholstery behind him. His version of relaxed.

  “We got out of Shanghai and headed south, with Wang—that’s Ming Li’s mother’s name, by the way, Wang—dressed as a boy, a servant. Sorry not to be more original, but there you are. She was my valet.”

  “She’s still your valet,” Ming Li says with a smile.

  “I need a lot of looking after,” Frank says.

  Poke is watching the way Ming Li looks at her father. “You didn’t used to.”