A Nail Through the Heart (13 page)

T
am’s widow, Mai, is one of the most beautiful human beings Rafferty has ever seen. Her eyes—puffy now from crying—tilt upward above an extraordinary pair of cheekbones, smooth enough to have been shaped by running water. Her nose is delicate and finely formed. She wears her black hair chopped short to reveal a swan’s neck and collarbones as refined as an angel’s wings. The tilted eyes are a light brown with flecks of gold buried in them. She is the color of weak tea, with a hint of heat just beneath the skin.

“He was the sweetest man,” she is saying. “He even loved my mother.” The memory of his sweetness brings the tissue back up to her eyes. The floor of the neat little apartment, a concrete cube as brightly decorated as a doll’s house, is littered with tight balls of Kleenex from the box on the table in front of her. The woman has been crying for hours.

“I’m sure your mother—” Rafferty begins helplessly, demonstrating all his skill with female grief.

“My mother is a dragon,” Mai says. She wads up the latest Kleenex and throws it at the carpet. It rolls up against the television, and Rafferty sees, on top of the big, old-fashioned set, a color photo of her and Tam, framed in teak. They look young and radiant and secure. The world has just been waiting for their arrival to make it complete. Nothing bad will ever happen to them.

Through the window above the TV set, Rafferty can see the sloping corrugated-iron roofs that keep the rain out of a rambling cluster of squatters’ shacks. The building in which Mai lived with Tam is a modest apartment house in aggressively unadorned Soviet cement, obviously put up ten or twelve years ago in the expectation that the neighborhood would somehow mysteriously gentrify. The occupants of the shacks, only a couple of dilapidated miles from the alley where Tam’s body was found, have apparently not gotten the news, or perhaps the general or police captain who owns the land is waiting for a better offer before he calls in the bulldozers. The result is a representative square of the Bangkok patchwork: poverty, aspiration, and affluence, jammed side by side, kings next to deuces as though a pack of cards has been thrown into the air. Beyond the shimmering iron of the shacks’ roofs, the broad brown ribbon of the Chao Phraya winds its way to the Gulf of Thailand.

“I
told
him to stop,” Mai says. She puts a hand on top of her head, as though to keep it from exploding. “I told him to do something else. I begged him, told him we didn’t need the money, it wasn’t worth the risk. He was so proud of what he could do. ‘Top two percent,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s all in the fingers.’ Like he was a magician or a violin player, not a criminal.” She stops, blinks. “The Cambodian man was a violin player.”

“He was?”

“Well, he said he was. That’s one reason Tam took the job.” She dabs at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Tam said they were both
artists.
”

“Did you tell that to the police?”

“I didn’t believe it,” she says. “I asked how he could play the violin with a hand that looked like a spider. Tam said he didn’t even have fingernails. They’d been pulled out.”

“Oh,” Rafferty says, putting his own hands in his pockets.

“And his name, that was a lie, too.
Chon.
It’s not even a real name. It sounds like something somebody made up who had heard Thai spoken on the radio.” She has worked a fingernail into the seam of the couch cushion and is slowly slitting it open. A little bubble of foam rubber bulges out. “A violin player with a fake name. The Saudi
jewels.
How could he have been so stupid?” A sob catches in her throat and sends her free hand to the Kleenex box, but the one on top has failed to pop up, and she takes both hands and rips the box in half. Tissues flutter to the floor. “What am I going to
do
?”

“Do you—” He stops. “Do you have any money?” A fat fold of Madame Wing’s fills his pocket.

The sob tails off into a sniffle, followed by a dab at her nose. “Money’s no problem. I have a job. I’ve always had a job. What I don’t have is a husband.”

“Are there…um, are there children?”

“He was my child.” She begins to weep again. “He was my child and my father and my husband. He
surrounded
me. I don’t even know where I am anymore.” She grabs a handful of tissues angrily and scrubs her face with them, then balls them up and tosses the wad, hard, at the window. “Are you married?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Then you don’t know anything,” she says, not unkindly.

“I know I can find the man who did this to you.”

She looks up at him, evaluating the worth of the offer. He has not taken a chair, although she offered him one. It seems impolite to do anything but stand in the presence of such sorrow. So there he stands, shambling and ill at ease, the duffel bag full of burglar tools sitting heavily at his feet like a sleeping dog. “It won’t bring him back.”

“No. Nothing will bring him back.”

She exhales for what seems like a minute, so long that Rafferty half expects her to disappear. “Why bother, then?”

“Because it’s wrong,” Rafferty says. “Because he killed your husband and made you unhappy. Because somebody should make him pay.”

She shrugs, and it seems to require all her energy. “He’ll pay for it in a future life.”

“I’d like to make him pay for it in this one. While I’m around to watch.”

“Why? What does this mean to you? We don’t even know you.”

“I’m tired of death. And I’m sick of deaths no one can do anything about. Nobody can take revenge on a wave. It’s just a wave. Even if you wanted to for some reason, you couldn’t find the water that formed the wave, could you? It’s disappeared back into the ocean. But a man isn’t a wave.” He realizes he has raised his voice and makes a conscious effort to lower it. “You can find a man.”

She is still, toying with a new Kleenex. Then, slowly, she tears it in half. “If you say so.”

“Do you know where they met?”

“In jail. Tam did something stupid, and they put him in jail. They were in the same cell just before he was released.”

“How many in the cell?”

“I don’t know. Eight, ten. What difference does it make?”

Rafferty pulls out his notebook. “It could give me a name. When was he in jail? When did he get out? Which jail?”

She closes her eyes, sealing herself off while she works through some private process. Then she sighs deeply and gets up from the couch.

“I’ll get my journal,” she says.

B
angkok, planted atop a river plain, is as flat as a piece of paper. The city slopes up slightly on either side of the river, but the incline is barely visible. The effluent-choked canals that once earned the city a highly misleading reputation as the Venice of the East flow between banks that rarely rise by more than three or four feet over the course of miles. Many of them now are too polluted and stinking to be navigated by anyone except locals in rough wooden flatboats.

In many great cities, the rich live within sight of water or on the heights. In Bangkok the water is likely to have wooden shacks built out over it with holes cut in the floor to serve as toilets. A river view here may mean nothing more than an extra ration of rats. Lacking hills to build upon, the city’s rich create height with skyscrapers and then move to the top. An economic map of Bangkok would have to be constructed in three dimensions, with much of the money floating well above ground level.

On his way home from Mai’s apartment near Klong Toey, Raf
ferty’s
tuk-tuk
passes through a misassembled jigsaw puzzle of urban landscapes: one-story cement shops with sliding iron grilles across the front, the chromium glitter of nightlife areas, the occasional placid narrow street lined by trees and the high walls of the wealthy, much like those surrounding Madame Wing. Bright new steel-and-glass apartment houses share a property line with tacked-together wooden slums that look like collections of driftwood. Silom Boulevard, off of which he lives, is a hybrid: a Western-style shopping area packed with restaurants, modern department stores, and expensive boutiques, all reached by threading one’s way through the little vendors’ booths that crowd the sidewalk, most numerous where Patpong empties into Silom like, Rose might say, a poisoned river. A sharp left takes Rafferty onto his own
soi,
an aggregate of still-inexpensive apartment houses of which his own, the Lovely Arms, is perhaps the least expensive. But it’s the closest thing to a home he’s had in the years he’s spent chasing himself across Asia to write his books and articles.

It’s probably because he
does
feel so at home there that he fails at first to notice the two men in the corridor when he gets off the elevator. He’s pulled out his keys before he registers their presence, and the day suddenly goes very sour indeed.

Two policemen, poised to knock two doors up from his, have turned to look at him. Rafferty tucks his keys into his fist so the points protrude, an impromptu pass at brass knuckles. He gets a better hold on the duffel bag, its weight suddenly reassuring rather than bothersome. There’s no way around the fact that these are the cops whose faces and information Arthit faxed him.

“You,” one of them says loudly. He’s short and fat, with a toad-like face that reminds Rafferty of an Olmec head. Rafferty has no idea what the other one looks like, because he can’t get his eyes any higher than the automatic the man has drawn.

“I
told
you it was 8-A,” says the man with the automatic.

As the two of them approach, Rafferty spreads his feet slightly and bends his knees just enough to give him some spring, then wraps his hand more tightly around the duffel’s handle. The one with the gun in his hand is thinner than his partner and dirtier, with a face so gaunt it
makes Rafferty think of the cartoon character Skeletor. His uniform is smudged with dirt and spots of something that could be blood, hot sauce, or both.

“We’re coming in,” says the toad-faced one.

“Actually,” Rafferty says, “you’re not.”

“We’re the police,” says the toad-faced one. “We’ll go wherever we like.”

Rafferty keeps his eyes on the gun. “At the moment you’re just a couple of shitheads who are off the clock,” he says. His voice is surprisingly steady. “And if anything happens to me, your own department will be up your assholes before you’ve had time to loosen your belts.”

“Be nice.” The fat one with the toad face is doing all the talking. “Just give us the money she gave you and we’ll go away.”

“She didn’t give me any money.”

Skeletor’s gun comes up to focus its single eye on Rafferty’s forehead, but the toad-faced man pushes it down. “Think about it,” he says. He gestures at the door to Rafferty’s apartment. “And remember that we know where you live. We know where your cop friend lives, too. Remember, his wife can’t move very fast.”

Rafferty feels the heat rise to the back of his neck. He lowers the duffel slowly to the floor, reaches into his shirt pocket, and pulls out his notebook, too angry to be frightened. He flips through it until he finds the page he wants and then turns it toward them. “Your home addresses,” he says. “So if you invite me over, I won’t need a map.”

Toadface studies it, although Rafferty doubts he can read the English in which he wrote the information. The numbers should be clear, though. “Is this supposed to frighten us?”

“Of course not,” Rafferty says. “But you should know that if anything happens to Noi, or if you try something with me that doesn’t actually kill me, I’ll be coming after you one at a time.”

“This is a mistake,” Toadface says. “A very big mistake.”

“I’m good at mistakes.” Rafferty closes the notebook. “I’ve made lots of them.” He crosses the hall and pushes the button for the elevator. The doors open instantly. Rafferty says, “Get out of here.”

Toadface takes a step toward him but stops dead when Rafferty’s neighbor, Mrs. Pongsiri, bustles out of the elevator, a sheaf of papers tucked under one arm. Seeing the three of them, she halts, an expectant half smile on her face. Then she takes the papers out from under her arm and fans herself with them. “You have friends among the police, Mr. Rafferty?”

“Yes and no,” Rafferty says. “These gentlemen are in the wrong apartment house.”

“Bangkok can be so confusing,” Mrs. Pongsiri says, her eyes bright with interest. The three men stand there as she watches them, still as figures in a display window. “Well,” she says, “I wish you luck finding the right place.” And she edges past Skeletor and down to the door of her apartment.

When they hear the lock thrown behind her, Toadface says, “You’re the one who needs luck.”

“All the time you had,” Rafferty says, “and that’s the best you could come up with? Bet you think of something better tonight.” He presses the elevator button once more.

They stare at him so long that the doors open and close again, and Rafferty feels sweat prickling his scalp. Then the toad-faced one takes the other by the elbow and leads him to the elevator. The doors open, and the two of them step inside. As the doors slide closed, the one with the gun lifts it again and points it at Rafferty.

“Bang,” he says. The doors close.

Rafferty lets the wall support him, not trusting his knees. His breath is shallow. It feels as if a steel band has been tightened around his chest. Not until it has eased, not until he knows he can walk a straight line, does he relax his grip on the keys, pick up the duffel, and go to the door.

He undoes the locks quietly and slowly pushes the door open, not wanting to awake the boy if he is still asleep.

The door bumps against something that should not be there, and Rafferty looks up to find himself being regarded by a dozen pairs of eyes. A hand comes around the door and pulls it the rest of the way open. A young woman had been sitting with her back to it.

From the couch Rose says, “Come in, we’re almost finished.”

“In many ways,” says one of the others.

“Passing through,” Rafferty says. Suddenly his voice is shaky. “I’ll be out of the way in a minute.” The women are regarding him with undisguised curiosity. So this is the
farang
Rose snagged, the brass ring so many of them hoped for when they worked the bars. One of them catches his eye, and, despite the fear, he feels himself blush. “Hello, Jit,” he says.

“I forgot,” Rose says, enjoying his embarrassment. “You know Jit already.”

“Pretty well, too,” Jit says in Thai. The women laugh.

“You forget me?” It is the woman who had been sitting against the door. Her face is scrubbed, unadorned by the garish makeup of the stage, and her age shows; she is ten years older than most of the other women in the room. It takes a moment for Rafferty to place her. “Fon,” he says, wishing he were anywhere else in the world. “How are you?”

“Poor,” Fon says, earning another laugh.

“Come the rest of the way in,” Rose says. “For all I know, you’ll recognize every one of them.”

He closes the door behind him and forces a smile in the general direction of the group, scanning for, and failing to find, another familiar face. They sit easily on the floor in jeans and T-shirts. The air is thick with cigarette smoke. Looking more closely at them, he sees strain in some of their faces even though they laughed so easily. He knows that laughter does not necessarily mean that Thai women are happy. He has often seen them literally laugh while they’re crying.

“We needed to talk,” Rose says. Then she smiles and says, “And I thought it would give you a chance to see some of your girlfriends.”

“Always a pleasure,” he says, feeling like a minor character in a bad English play. “Where’s the boy?”

“He said he was going out. Just out. But he drank a cup of coffee with me before he left.”

“He’s too young for coffee.” The response is automatic, something his mother would have said.

“Coffee’s pretty mild compared to some of the things he’s already done. But the point was that he sat with me for half an hour. He even talked a little.”

“About what?” Rafferty makes an erasing gesture, palms out. “Sorry. Later. Go ahead with your meeting.”

“Come back soon, Poke,” Fon says breathily in bar-girl English. “Miss you too much.” Another wave of laughter.

In the bedroom Rafferty exhales heavily several times. Then he pulls the tools out of the bag, stops, asks himself what he is doing, and puts them in again. Normally they’re stored in the kitchen, and it would take a fire to drive him back into the living room. He hoists the bag again and totes it to the closet, moving some clothes aside so he can put it behind them.
Where Ulrich’s suitcase was,
he thinks. He rearranges the clothes to mask the bag and goes to the bed.

Built into the headboard, behind a sliding panel, is a small safe. He pulls a chain from around his neck, noticing that it is slick with his sweat. Dangling beside the Buddhist amulet Rose gave him for protection is a key. The safe’s hinges squeal, so he opens the door slowly. Inside he sees the thick envelope containing most of Madame Wing’s advance, converted into smaller bills, and an oil-stained cloth wrapped around something heavy. He removes the bundle and grasps one corner of the cloth, letting it unspool over the bed. The gun that hits the mattress is a Glock nine-millimeter, blue-black, with the forward-leaning lines that make so many guns look as if they are designed by small boys. Two spare magazines, already loaded, also tumble to the bed.

With a murder—perhaps two—plus a couple of renegade cops at the door, the gun seems like a sensible precaution. He is buffing it with the cloth when the door opens and Rose comes in with several sheets of paper in her hand. The sight of the gun stops her.

“Nothing to worry about,” he says. He checks the safety and slips the gun into his pants.

“Of course not. We’ve got the boy on our hands, you’re doing errands for the police, and now you’re carrying a gun. And my business is falling apart. Other than that, everything’s fine.”

“What do you mean, the business is falling apart?”

She waves the hand with the papers in it in the direction of the living room. “Three of them are going back to the bars. One of them is Fon.”

“Fon’s too old to work the bars.”

“Not the blow-job bars,” Rose says. “They might not take her if she was dead, but as it is, she’ll get work fast enough.”

“This is about money.” The blow-job bars are the most dismal of Bangkok’s commercial sex venues, tiny, filthy holes where customers belly up to a bar with a curtain beneath it and a woman parts the curtain, kneels, and services them as they drink. He does not want to think of Fon in one of them.

“It’s always money,” she says. “Why do you think they work the bars in the first place?”

“Come on. All the guys hear the same stories: Mama’s sick, Papa drinks, little brother has to go to school, the buffalo skinned its knee. You know as well as I do, half the time Mama spends the money on a color television set or a year-round Christmas tree because she likes the way it sparkles.”

Rose’s chin comes up. “So?”

“Not exactly life-and-death issues.”

“To these girls Mama’s color TV is the least they owe her. It’s about family, Poke, not that I expect a
farang
to understand that. If a child can give something to the family, that makes merit, and it also makes Mama happy.”

“So we’re in a world where this makes sense somehow: blow jobs for a permanent Christmas tree.”

She waves a hand as though she could scatter the words across the room. “It’s not really about money. It’s about failure,” she says. “My failure. I can’t get them work.”

His irritation dissipates instantly. “Rose,” he says.

She balls her fists, crumpling the papers. “Don’t comfort me. I really couldn’t stand to be comforted right now.”

“You’re just getting started,” he says. “You can’t expect it to work right away.”

“They’re
hungry,
Poke. And, worse than that, their families are hungry. Whether it’s for food or a new leather couch. Say whatever you want, you have to remember there
are
brothers and sisters who need to go to school. Those kids are real. Papa’s drinking problems are real. And in the meantime these girls are hungry.”

“They can’t work if they’re hungry,” Rafferty says. “How many of them are out there?”

“Thirteen. If Fon and the others haven’t already left.”

“Three hundred dollars each,” Rafferty says, reaching for the wad in his pocket. “That’s thirty-nine hundred dollars. Tell them it’s an advance.” He begins to count out the bills.

She watches him count for a moment, her eyes on the bills. “This money,” she says. “This is why you’re carrying the gun?”