A Nail Through the Heart (17 page)

T
he man who stands in the door wears a pair of loose shorts in a dull pumpkin color that goes nicely with the yellowing bruises on his upper body and his face. He has bumps and cuts everywhere, his nose has probably been broken, and one eye is swollen tightly shut. Gashes—rips, really, they’re too ragged to be called gashes—mark his face and shoulders in a violent calligraphy. The dark skin over his ribs is blotched with welts.

“You got my note.”

The man nods and grabs his neck in pain.

“Pak did this?” Rafferty asks.

The man looks past him into the corridor to make sure Rafferty has come alone, and then he nods again. “Pak and some others,” he says. Two of his front teeth have been broken. When he pronounces an
s,
he whistles.

“How long did they work on you?” Rafferty is speaking Thai.

“One hour, two hours, I don’t know.”

Rafferty steps in and closes the door behind him. The bruised man
retreats. The apartment is the size of a large closet, hot, with an unpainted concrete floor and one tiny window. A hot plate in the corner serves as a kitchen, and a mat on the floor passes for a bed. Except for a sagging wooden table with a television on it, there is no furniture. Clothes hang from nails driven into the walls, which were painted aquamarine quite a long time ago. The ceiling is high and clouded with cobwebs.

“Did you tell them who the thief was?” Rafferty seats himself on the floor, cross-legged. After a moment of gazing down at him, the man sits, too, grunting with the effort.

He licks his lips and winces as though it stings. “I don’t know who it was.”

Rafferty lets it pass. “Did they make you help them get rid of the body?”

The man’s good eye opens in alarm. “What body?”

“Tam’s,” Rafferty says, as if it were self-evident. “The safecracker.”

“No body,” the man says. He is looking at a spot above Rafferty’s head.

“We’ll get along a lot better if you just assume I know everything,” Rafferty says. “I’m talking about the body you found in or near the hole they dug. The Thai man who had been shot, once, in the back. The guy who actually opened the safe while the Cambodian—What’s his name?”

The man studies him with the open eye but says nothing.

“Chouk,” Rafferty says, seeing the eye skitter away. “While Chouk stood over him.”

“I don’t know Chouk,” the man says. His voice has a thin, rippling edge to it, as though he doesn’t have enough breath to support it.

“Of course you do. You let him onto the property. Or maybe you know him as Chon.”

“You should go,” the man says, starting to rise.

“You should have made him hit you for real,” Rafferty says, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder and forcing him back down. It is pathetically easy to do. “What happened? Did he forget? Or did you go away while he was working and come back after he left?”

“He did hit me,” the man says insistently. He leans forward and parts his hair to show Rafferty a nasty-looking wound on his scalp. “He hit me from behind, with a rock.”

“Let’s talk about the rock,” Rafferty says.

The guard closes his eyes. “The rock?”

“Here’s the way I figure it happened: You were on duty at the pier, vigilant as always. He pulled his boat in while your back was turned and tied it to the pier, and then he crept up the pier while your back was still turned, and then he went all the way across the lawn while your other back was turned, and he grabbed a stone from a row of them edging a flower bed, and then he crept all the way back down the lawn, while your back was turned, and hit you on the head with the rock. While all your backs were turned. Something like that?”

The man has paled. He opens his eyes and pats his bare chest, as though checking a pocket for cigarettes.

“You’re not wearing a shirt,” Rafferty reminds him.

“Cigarette,” the man says. It is a croak.

Rafferty extends an empty hand and tilts it side to side to say he doesn’t have any. “You want a glass of water?”

“Never.” The man shudders. “I’ll never drink water again.”

“Pak didn’t notice the rock,” Rafferty says. “Nobody knows about it except you and me.”

“I need to think,” the man says.

“Want me to go down and get you some cigarettes while you work it out?”

“No. Yes.”

“My treat,” Rafferty says. He got up. “Just make sure you’re here when I get back, because if you’re not, Madame Wing is going to be very upset with you.”

T
he guard was promised a million baht,” Rafferty says.

“Did he get it?” Arthit is on a car phone that keeps fritzing in and out.

“Not yet.”

“That might be good for us,” Arthit says. “Unlikely as it seems, Chouk might try to make payment.”

“Chouk came up to him in a restaurant one night, sat down, and started talking. Said he had it all worked out, had the plan in place. All he needed was the location of the safe and a couple of hours on the property.”

“And the guard knew where the safe was.”

“Helped to dig the hole. He’d worked there almost twenty years.”

“He let these guys in after twenty years in the house? Doesn’t say much for loyalty.”

“Madame Wing isn’t someone who inspires much loyalty.”

Rafferty is lying full length on the couch, trying to find some
where to rest his weight that doesn’t hurt. Late-afternoon sun slants malevolently through the sliding glass door. Miaow has not come home from school yet, and the boy is off somewhere. Probably sharpening his teeth.

“You there?” Arthit asks.

“Just lolling around. It may be hard for you to imagine, Arthit, just how leisurely my life actually is.”

“What could be in a cardboard envelope that’s worth a million baht?”

“For all I know, it’s her diary. This is not a woman with a sunny past.”

“Does the guard have a way to reach Chouk?”

“He says not. Says Chouk will call him when the money’s ready.”

“Trusting soul, isn’t he?” Arthit says.

“He’s barely sentient.”

“Are you going to tell Madame Wing about this?”

“I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “They really beat the shit out of him, and that was when they only
suspected
he was involved.”

“So what’s the next move?”

“We assume he’s going to get paid.”

“Why? Chouk’s other little helper got killed.”

“Whatever was in that safe, I think Tam got shot because he saw it. The guard got off the property and stayed off. He didn’t see anything.”

“So we watch the guard,” Arthit says. “Wait for the payoff.”

“Can you do that without attracting too much attention?”

“Sure. I’ll assign Cho to it.” Cho is Arthit’s brother-in-law, a chubby, sweet-natured boy who took a degree in library science and then decided to be a policeman. The career move had been a mistake. “It’s perfect for Cho. He can sit in one place and eat noodles in the car, and all he has to do is make a phone call when the subject starts to move. Does the guy move around much? If he’s more mobile than, say, the average couch, Cho will probably lose him.”

“At the moment he can barely make it to the bathroom. Who’ll watch when Cho goes off?”

“I’ll take care of that. I still have a fragile, if deteriorating, network of personal alliances at my disposal.”

“I’m sorry about all this, Arthit,” Rafferty says dutifully.

“Just keep your eyes open. My two colleagues probably aren’t finished with you.”

“No problem,” Rafferty says. “I’ll sic the boy on them.”

THE MINUTE RAFFERTY
hangs up, the phone rings. The screams of children in the background identify the caller as Hank Morrison before he can even say hello.

“Poke. Let’s get together.”

“What about the prospective parents?” Rafferty tries another position on the couch and rejects it.

“We’re in the ooh and aah phase. It’ll last a couple of days. You want to get this started?”

“More than anything in the world.”

“When? I’ll need at least two or three hours, Poke, one with the two of you and one or two with each of you alone. Not today, though,” Morrison says. “I’m jammed. How about tomorrow afternoon?”

“Give me an hour after she gets home from school. Say, four, four-thirty. Is there anything I should bring?”

“Your passport, visa, whatever you’ve got. Something to show you’re solvent—a year’s worth of bank statements ought to do it.”

“No problem.” Thanks in part to the shudderiferous Madame Wing.

Morrison says, “Hold on,” and Rafferty hears the phone hit the desk. A moment later the voices of the children are muted, and Morrison comes back on the line.

“Had to close the door,” he says. He clears his throat. “Poke, don’t take any of this wrong, okay?”

“Any of what?”

“Of what we’re about to discuss. Is she a virgin?”

The muscles in Rafferty’s shoulders go rigid. “I have no idea,” he says stiffly.

“She’s going to be examined, Poke. Medically, I mean. Most of the
time, there aren’t any snags, if only because there are so many ways a hymen can be broken accidentally, but any sign of repeated sexual activity—”

“As I said, I have no idea.”

“You’ve never talked about it with her?”

“We’ve talked about everything in the world except that.”

“Well,
I’m
going to have to talk to her about it.”

“Good luck,” Rafferty says, imagining the set of Miaow’s mouth when she’s planted her feet.

“You’ve got to tell her to answer me,” Morrison says. “Tell her how important it is, that we could have problems if we don’t know the truth. And that includes you, Poke. You’ve never touched her improperly, have you?”

“Hank, if it were anybody but you, I’d come over there and slice you from gut to gullet and put in a defective zipper.”

“I have to ask you the question. I’ll have to ask her, too.”

Rafferty’s heart is hammering in his ears. “If you have to, you have to.”

“Poke, how emotional are you about the possibility that she’s been abused in the past?”

“No more emotional than anyone else would be.”

Morrison pauses. “Which is to say what?”

“Which is to say I’ll kill anybody who messed with her.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Look, I can either tell you what she says in our interview or not tell you. Which would you prefer?”

He weighs it for a moment. “Don’t tell me. I want to hear it from her, when she’s ready.”

“What’s your gut feeling?”

“I think, at the very least, people have tried.” He tells Morrison about Miaow’s defensive reaction when she is hugged too quickly or when she does not initiate it.

“Aaaahh,” Morrison says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Some of the most abused kids are also the most physically affectionate. They’ve learned it’s the best way to manipulate adults.”

“Well, that’s not Miaow. Miaow manipulates adults by having the
strongest will since Margaret Thatcher. Strong enough to talk me into putting up with Superman.”

“On a temporary basis, I hope.”

“Until I can figure something else out.”

“Poke, you’re not the first person to try to help that kid. He’s had a lot of chances.”

“Oh, please, Hank. Compared to who?”

“You can’t think about these children in the same way you think about American kids. Compared to a lot of the little lost souls abandoned on the streets of Southeast Asia,
that’s
compared to who.”

“We’re getting along fine,” Rafferty says, and the door to the apartment opens and the boy walks in. He has the worst black eye Rafferty has ever seen, something straight out of the “Our Gang” comedies. The scrape on his forehead is a crust of brown, but his long hair is clean and neatly brushed. It falls over the damaged eye with a sort of Veronica Lake effect. He waves stiffly at Rafferty, as though the gesture is new to him, and Rafferty returns the wave.

“He’s a good kid to have on your side in a fight,” Rafferty continues, making a fist and pretending to hit himself in the jaw. The boy laughs. Rafferty tells Morrison about the attack the previous evening, making it sound like a random mugging. He smiles at the boy and gets one in return. Superman sits on the carpet, waiting for Rafferty to finish. He fidgets from side to side. He looks eager about something.

“Well, be careful of him,” Morrison says. “Don’t give him a chance to steal from you.”

“I’m not worried about that. It’s just stuff.”

“That’s either a noble statement or a stupid one. Bye, Poke.”

Rafferty hangs up the phone and looks at the boy. The boy looks expectantly back at Rafferty, as though he is waiting for something. Rafferty feels his smile go stale, and he sees something like disappointment come into the boy’s eyes. Finally, just the tiniest of gestures, the boy turns his head an eighth of an inch toward the opposite wall and lifts his chin.

Rafferty looks in the indicated direction. His fax has a paper tray attached to it.

“You fixed it!” Rafferty jumps to his feet and practically runs to the fax. The paper tray is in place, firmly anchored and ruler straight. He turns to the boy.

“I fixed the ring, too,” the boy says shyly. “Now it only rings twice before it answers.”

“This thing has been broken for months.”

“Easy,” the boy says. He is looking at the carpet.

Rafferty starts to hug him and then slaps his hands together instead. There are probably twenty ways to handle this, and nineteen of them are wrong. He goes through at least seventeen of them mentally before he says, “How much do you know about garbage disposals?”

SOK POCHARA IS
having an unusual day.

He has been driving the cab since 6:00
A.M.
His first fare, a
farang
man, threw up in the backseat, reminding Sok that it is rarely a good idea to pick up someone who is flagging you on all fours. After Sok cleaned the cab, he picked up the fat twins, two men in their forties who looked exactly alike, dressed exactly alike, and talked exactly alike. They could barely squeeze into the back of the cab. When he dropped them off, they split the fare exactly and tipped precisely the same amount, which is to say zero. They were followed by a ladyboy in an all-white wedding gown with sparkles on it who was weeping uncontrollably and who jumped out of the cab at a stoplight without paying him. The cab is still sweet with his/her perfume when he picks up the girl with the two big suitcases.

Airport
, he thinks as he pulls to the curb, barely beating out two other cabs. He loads her luggage, as heavy as he is, into the trunk, gets back into the cab, and says, “Where?”

“Anywhere,” she says. “Just drive.”

“That could get expensive,” he says, and she reaches forward and drops a thousand-baht bill on the seat beside him. “I’ll drive,” Sok says.

Half an hour passes. Sok decides to see how many times he can
cross the river without covering the same ground twice. The meter says 820 baht when the girl’s cell phone rings.

“Hello?” she says. Then she listens for a long minute. Then she says, “I understand,” and leans forward and says to Sok, “Stop here.”

Sok pulls to the curb and starts to get out to help her with the suitcases, but she says, “Wait,” and hands him another 500 baht. “Stay here,” she says. “In a minute you’ll see me talking to a man. When we finish, he’ll get into the cab, and you take him anywhere he wants to go. When he gets out, he will take my suitcases with him.”

Another one,
Sok thinks.
Maybe I should be doing construction work.

Within seconds, a cab pulls up to the curb in front of them, and Sok watches as a man gets out. He is short and dark, and there is something wrong with one of his hands. He waves his cab away with the bad hand, and when it has disappeared in traffic, the young woman gets out of Sok’s cab. The man gives her a big envelope and comes toward Sok’s cab. He gets in and says, “Drive.”

Sok lets him out in Pratunam twenty minutes later. The man melts into the crowd, pulling the suitcases.

An hour after that, Madame Wing tears open the envelope and sinks her nails into the maid’s eyes.