A Nail Through the Heart (24 page)

D
inner is pineapple pizza, brought back from Silom by Superman. During the time he is gone, Miaow sets the table, filling a vase with cutouts of flowers she has colored on heavy paper, which seems to be a special touch for the boy. The flowers give the table a bright, cartoonish touch, although Superman barely seems to notice them. He keeps his eyes on the table. But he eats.

Rafferty moves aimlessly from room to room in a fog of fury, arguing with himself and losing. It’s not so much, he tells himself, that what he has in mind will probably result in Madame Wing’s death; it’s that he will be having others do the dirty work. Rafferty has always believed that bad deeds, if they must be done, should be done personally.

But he can’t just let her walk away.

While they are eating, Arthit knocks at the door. He comes in wearing his plaid trousers, eyes the pizza, and accepts a slice. While Rafferty is getting him a beer, he appears in the kitchen door.

“Thanks for coming,” Rafferty says.

“I was coming anyway, even if you hadn’t called. My two colleagues, the ones who were helping Clarissa spend her money, put an interesting file on my desk this afternoon.”

“This is exactly what I need to hear right now,” Rafferty says, opening a second beer. He is gripping the can so hard that it crumples as the top pops, and beer sloshes over his hand. He stares down at it and then licks it off.

Arthit is watching him with interest. “It’s a complaint against you. Alleging that you’re keeping children here for immoral purposes.”

Rafferty lets the counter take all his weight. “I’ll kill them. I mean it, Arthit. I’ll kill both of them.”

“No you won’t.” Arthit looks at the beer in his own hand but doesn’t drink. “Not yet anyway. They told me you had two days to pay them off or they’ll file the complaint officially.”

“Two days. There seems to be something magical about the day after tomorrow. How much?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty?”

“They think big.”

Miaow comes into the kitchen with a plate containing a second slice of pizza for Arthit, looks at their faces, and leaves, still carrying the plate.

“So back to Plan A.” Rafferty lowers his voice. “I kill them.”

“We have two days to come up with Plan B,” Arthit says. “When you called, you said something about a market for fugitives.”

“Is there one?”

“This is a vague area. Talking about it puts me in a difficult position, Poke. Normally, of course, what one does with fugitives is turn them over to the police.”

“This particular fugitive has the police in her pocket.”

Arthit looks past Rafferty for a second and then right at him. He takes his first pull on the beer, a good long one. “Is this somebody we’ve discussed before? Lives on the river?”

“It is.”

“And you can verify her fugitive status?”

“Can I ever.”

A pause long enough for Arthit to be doing addition in his head. “Do you have a name? Other than the one I already know?”

Rafferty watches Arthit’s eyes. “Keck.”

For a moment Arthit has no reaction. Then he says, “My, my. One of the top beasts.”

“I’ve got pictures.”

“I’ll bet they’re lovely.”

“If you’re going to look at them, you’ll be glad you didn’t have that second slice of pizza.”

Arthit drops his eyes to the can in his hand and then lifts them to the ceiling. “I need to think.” He goes to the kitchen counter and pulls out a chair. “Join me?” he says.

“Always a pleasure.” Rafferty sits opposite him and watches him think. Looking at the sallow skin, the lines of strain around his friend’s eyes, he feels a sudden surge of affection. He reaches over and clumsily pats the back of Arthit’s hand. Arthit grabs his hand for a second, then releases it and straightens, all business.

“If you have the pictures, I assume that you also have the person who stole them, since they were obviously in the safe.”

“Assume away.”

“Okay, three things. First, I wasn’t kidding about this being dangerous for me. It’s beyond illegal. I can’t be involved in any way. It could end my career, such as it is. More important, it could endanger Noi. Her medical bills are eating me alive. If I were to lose my job—”

A wave of shame washes over Rafferty. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have asked. I wasn’t thinking.”

Arthit raises a hand. “And I wasn’t finished. That was the first thing. The second thing is that you’re going to need agents, for want of a better word, agents who can shop her. She’s not a Nazi or a Serbian war criminal. People like that you can turn over to a number of organizations, even governments. But no one is hunting for Khmer Rouge executioners. The Cambodians would probably pay you
not
to find her. Many of the ranking members of Hun Sen’s government
were KR not so long ago. Someone like Keck could tell stories that would be intensely embarrassing.”

“So?”

“So that means the clients, such as they are, will be individuals. There should be plenty of those, but they’ll have limited funds.”

Rafferty shakes his head. “I don’t care about the money.”

“No, but your agents will.”

“You said three things. What was the third?”

“You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“If I were going to think you were crazy, Arthit, I’d have started long ago.”

“It’s about your agents. You need to consider the skills they’ll have to possess.”

This is going somewhere, although Rafferty doesn’t know where. “Maybe you could save me the effort. Since you already seem to know.”

“Righty-oh.” Arthit holds up a handful of fingers and ticks them off one at a time. “They need to be connected to the criminal underground. They need to know Bangkok extremely well. They need to be familiar with the protocols of delivering prisoners. They need to be greedy. And they can’t be afraid of a little violence.”

Rafferty’s mind is going off on an extremely unattractive tangent. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”

“Think of it,” Arthit says, “as two birds with one stone.”

“I take it back. You
are
crazy.”

“It would save them face. It would give them a little money—not as much as they want, but enough to salve their wounds.” He drinks again. “It would kill the report on my desk.”

“It would bring those two assholes back into my life.”

“You’re not paying attention.
It would kill the report on my desk.
It takes care of this vile woman. Poke. Just once in your life, as a favor to me, be rational.”

“They’re not smart enough. This is no ordinary old lady. She’s as poisonous as a krait.”

“You need greedy and brutal, and you’re getting greedy and bru
tal. You supply the smart.” He drums his fingers on the table, waiting. “Shall I set up a meeting?”

From the living room, Rafferty hears Miaow and Superman talking. “Fine,” he says brusquely. “But I’ll call them, not you.” Then he looks again at the man seated across the table: tired, rumpled, homely, wearing awful trousers. “Arthit,” he begins, but Arthit raises a hand.

“You’re my friend,” he says.

“There’ll come a time.”

Arthit picks up the can of beer and sloshes it experimentally, hears nothing, and puts it down with a disappointed expression. “And what about our murderer? Do you plan to notify me officially at any point?”

“Eventually.”

“When?”

“As soon as he’s better,” Rafferty says.

“What? Is he down with the flu or something?”

“Iron poisoning.”

“Not lead?”

“Nothing that technologically advanced.”

“And you’re tending his wounds?” Arthit cranes his head in the direction of the living room. “My, my. You’re running a regular little hotel here.”

“Arthit,” Rafferty says. “The people she’ll be sold to…”

“What about them?”

“They’re not likely to wish her well.”

Arthit picks up the beer can and peers through the hole in the top, then looks back up. “That’s a safe assumption,” he says.

H
e matches the phone numbers to the faces in the file Arthit gave him and chooses the toad-faced one, the one who seemed to be calling the shots during their single encounter. While the phone rings, he surveys his little domain: two homeless children tucked away in one bedroom, a murderer chained to the bed in the other, sweetheart temporarily displaced. A tomato-soup-can burglar alarm stacked beside the door. His dream home.

A child answers the phone.

Rafferty has a sinking feeling he’s been experiencing a lot lately. The last thing he wants to do is begin to think of Toadface as an actual human being. “Can I speak to your father, please?” he asks in Thai.

“Sure,” the child says. Then she shrills, “Papaaaaaaa!”

Papa.
Just what he wanted to hear.

“Hello?” Toadface says.

“This is Poke Rafferty.”

“That was fast.” The man’s tone is fat with satisfaction.

“Yeah, well, don’t get ahead of yourself. Clarissa hasn’t given me
any money, and I couldn’t raise fifty thousand dollars if you gave me a year.”

“And you’ve only got two days. Doesn’t sound like we’ve got much to talk about.” Rafferty hears a child’s question, and Toadface says, “In a minute, sweetie.” His voice is completely different.

“That’s one way to look at it,” Rafferty says. “Two days from now, I don’t come up with the money and you go ahead and destroy my family. And I lose a child I love, and you get zero. Nothing. Not a baht. Think about it. Does that sound like a worthwhile objective?”

The child asks another question, but it goes unanswered. It is repeated. Finally Toadface says, “Have you got something else in mind?”

“I do,” Rafferty says. “And you guys are perfect for it.”

RAFFERTY IS PICKING
up the tomato cans when the boy comes into the room. He immediately begins to help.

“We don’t need these anymore?”

“I don’t think so. Everybody who wants to kill us is busy.”

Miaow has gone to her room. She seems upset about Chouk’s presence, especially the information that he is handcuffed, and Rafferty wonders whether she’ll turn it into a bulletin for Hank Morrison at their next meeting. The boy is wearing his new blue sweatpants and the pink T-shirt Miaow bought Rafferty as a gift. It’s too small for Rafferty, but on the boy it hangs like a poncho.

“Let’s put these away for Rose,” Rafferty says. The boy follows him into the kitchen.

“The policeman who was here,” the boy says. “Is he your friend?”

“One of them. I actually have several.”

A pause as the boy works something through in his head. “You like him, even though he’s a policeman.”

“I like some crooks, too.”

“Huh,” the boy says, unconvinced.

Rafferty closes the cabinet door and heads back to the living room,
the boy trailing in his wake. He sits at one end of the couch, leaving room for Superman, but the boy sinks into a cross-legged stance on the floor. He fluffs the rug with the palms of both hands, something Rafferty has watched him do dozens of times. “Soft,” he says.

“That’s the point.”

He opens his mouth, thinks about it, and strokes the carpet as he would a puppy. At last he says, “Too bad the world isn’t soft.”

“Ah,” Rafferty says with a twinge of unease. They seem to be having a talk.

“Do you know why it isn’t?”

Rafferty gives the question some thought. “You mean, why is it softer for some people than for others?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea.”

The boy doesn’t even blink. “Who does?”

“Oh, well,” Rafferty says. “Lots of people have theories. Priests, politicians, philosophers. I think they’re all guessing, though.”

“What’s your guess?”

“Dumb luck,” Rafferty says, glad Rose isn’t there to hear him.

“That just makes me angry.” The boy’s jaw comes forward, bull-doglike.

“Then believe something else. Karma, reincarnation, Cosmic Lotto. Being angry’s just going to make things worse.”

A shrug, too weary for a child his age. “Like it matters if I’m angry.”

“Right now you’re dry, you’re wearing clean clothes, you just had that awful pizza with all the pineapple on it. You’ve got a bed to sleep in tonight. You’ve got friends.”

“Because you
gave
it all to me,” the boy challenges. “Tomorrow if you change your mind, I’ll be on the street again. How do you think that feels?”

“Better than being there tonight. And I didn’t give it to you, we all did. Why do you think we did that?”

The boy looks down at the carpet. He makes scissors from his fingers and pretends to trim the nap. He shows Rafferty nothing but
the top of his head. When he speaks, Rafferty can barely hear him. “Phuket,” he says.

Rafferty had thought he had used up his evening’s supply of apprehension, but there it is again, dead center in the middle of his chest. “Right,” he says. “Phuket.”

The boy looks up at him and then away. “You won’t tell Miaow.”

“I won’t tell anybody. Look, there are lots of things I’ve never asked Miaow. I figure it’s her business to tell me when she wants to. It’s the same with you. It’s your story, and you tell it to her when it’s time.”

“I’ll never tell it to her.”

“Your call.”

He plays with the carpet again. “It was a man,” he says.

Immediately Rafferty thinks of Ulrich. He breathes a couple of times to make sure his voice will be steady. “What happened?”

“I went down there because the police were looking for me here. And I wanted to be someplace where I didn’t have to be, you know…” His voice trails off. “Where I didn’t have to be Superman.” He tugs the carpet hard enough to lift it from the floor. “I wanted to stop taking
yaa baa.
”

“Good for you.”

“And I met a man. He saw me on the street and talked to me. He was an American, like you, and he…he seemed to like me. Not just for sex. He took me to movies. Real movies, in theaters, not videos. He bought me things.” Rafferty remembers the boy’s sullenness during their shopping expedition and, with a pang of shame, the irritation it had provoked. “He let me stay with him. I slept and slept. I stopped taking pills and smoking. When he wanted me, he gave me whiskey so it wouldn’t hurt so much.” He lifts his head and looks in the direction of the hallway that leads to Miaow’s room. “It still hurt, really, but I said it didn’t. I got to like the whiskey.” He seems to lose the thread for a moment, gazing down the hall. “I began to think he loved me,” he says. “His name was Al.”

“What happened?”

“He ran out of money. One day he had money, and the next day
he didn’t. They were going to throw us out of the room. So one night Al brought home two men and told me they had paid to fuck me, and I was going to fuck them, or he was going to kick me out. I thought about going, but I had seen the money. I fucked them.”

“I’m sorry,” Rafferty says.

The boy shrugs the sentiment away. “That night, after the two men left, I waited until Al was asleep. Then I got dressed and opened the dresser and took the money. And then I crawled across the bed and bit Al’s ear off.”

His eyes are locked on Rafferty’s. “He bled a lot,” he says, still watching. When Rafferty doesn’t avert his gaze, the boy looks away. “I ran. All the way back to Bangkok.”

First Chouk’s story, now this. Rafferty shuffles through a dozen replies and finally says, “You didn’t deserve any of that.”

“Then why did it happen?” The boy’s voice scales so high it almost breaks on the last word. His eyes are enormous, and Rafferty sees them for the first time as what they are: the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. “Why did it happen to
me
? Why not somebody else?”

“Wait,” Rafferty says. “This is a big question. Give me a second here.” He leans back against the couch and rolls his head slowly around to get the stiffness out of his neck. “Okay. Listen to me, even if I make some mistakes, right?”

“Fine,” the boy says.

“Nobody can really answer that question. Why am I lucky? I don’t know. I’ve never gone hungry, I’ve got both arms and legs. You’ve had a shitty life, and I don’t understand that either. Rose would say it’s karma, but I don’t understand much about karma. So do I know why you had to be the one that man treated that way? No. I can’t explain how the guy handcuffed to my bed could have gone through what he went through either, so I’m a complete bust. By the way, you were wrong about him. He wasn’t one of the ones who did all that. He was one of the ones it was done to.”

Superman ducks his head awkwardly, and Rafferty knows that it is all the apology the boy will make.

“Anyway,” Rafferty says, backtracking, “you’re here now. Al’s
not. Who knows? Maybe he died of blood poisoning. Maybe the tsunami got him. But you’re here. And you’re wrong about why you’re here. We didn’t just give it all to you. If you hadn’t been a good kid, I’d have bathed you and debugged you and thrown you back on the sidewalk, no matter what Miaow said.”

The boy mumbles something to the carpet.

“Say what?”

“Not good. Me.”

“Oh, shut up,” Rafferty says. “I know enough about you to know you’re a great kid. So you bit a guy’s ear off.” He can hardly believe he’s saying the words. “He had it coming. It wasn’t your fault. You’re smart, you’re tough, you’re self-sufficient, you’re brave, you can fix anything….” He runs out of steam, hearing the hollowness of his words.

The silence stretches between them, and the boy offers him a way out of it. “I fixed the lock on Miaow’s closet door.”

This is real news. “Really? It’s not permanently locked anymore? She can close it?”

“No problem.” The boy glances up at him. He is on safer ground. “What did you do when she closed it before?”

“Took it off the hinges,” Rafferty says, happy to have a question he can answer.

The boy lowers his face and makes a sound that could be a snicker. “The
hinges,
” he says.

“See? You can do things I can’t. I can do things you can’t. That means we can do things for each other, doesn’t it?”

A dismissive shake of the head. “Yeah, yeah.” The boy puts a hand down in preparation to get up.

“Hey. You started this. I’m not exactly an expert on life, but you asked me a question and I think you ought to sit here until I finish making a fool out of myself.”

The boy doesn’t respond, but he remains seated.

“Look, the world is softer for some people than others. That’s the way it is. Some people don’t have enough to eat, some weigh three hundred pounds. And you, you got a really shitty deal. Okay, that’s
too bad. We all agree, it’s just terrible. It absolutely keeps me awake nights.” His tone brings the boy’s head up sharply. “So what can you do? You can’t change the world, you know. It’s too damn big. So what does that leave?”

The boy says nothing, just sits cross-legged with both palms pressed to the carpet, his fingers splayed like those of a runner about to start a sprint.

“I hate to give advice, so I’ll tell you a story instead. It’s a Tibetan Buddhist story. A young monk goes to the wisest man he knows, the abbot of his temple, and asks the same question you’ve just asked: Why is the world so hard and sharp? Why does it have to hurt my feet? And instead of answering, the abbot asks the kid whether it would be better if the world were covered with leather—have you heard this?”

The boy shakes his head.

“Okay, so the young monk says sure it would. It’d be a lot better. And the abbot asks the kid whether he knows how to cover the world with leather, and the kid says no, of course he doesn’t, because he’s a smart kid, a realistic kid. There’s no way he can cover the world with leather. ‘Fine,’ says the abbot. ‘Can you cover your feet with leather?’”

Superman’s eyes lift slowly to study the wall above Rafferty’s head. After a long moment, he nods once. “Then what?” he asks.

“Then we’re going to get you into a school,” Rafferty says. “And you’re going to hate it sometimes, because you’re just going to be a kid, not someone who runs things, but you’re going to stay there because you belong there. Nobody’s giving you anything. You’ll earn it by being a good, smart kid and by showing up every day and by staying away from
yaa baa
and glue and whatever the hell else you were stuffing into your system. And if you screw up, you know what? There’s not going to be a net. You’re just going to fall. We can help you, but only if you want it. If you don’t want it badly enough to pay for it, there’s nothing anybody can do.”

“You can do this? You can get me into a school?”

“No problem.” Rafferty replays his conversation with Morrison in his mind. “I think.”

“You’ll try?”

This is not something to take lightly, and he pauses long enough to feel the boy’s eyes on him. “I promise.”

“Why?” He still has his hands braced on the floor, as though he is ready to bolt from the room.

“Because Miaow loves you. Because you helped her.”

The boy looks away, out through the sliding glass door at the lights of Bangkok. His body is very still.

“And because I think you’re a terrific kid,” Rafferty adds awkwardly.

The boy says, without turning, “And you don’t want anything?”

“I want you to work. I want you to do whatever you have to do to put leather on your feet so you can step on the sharp stuff without hurting yourself.”

The boy gets up, all in one motion. Rafferty can remember being that limber, but not for quite a while. Superman puts both hands in his pockets and stares at the floor. Then he takes a slow step and then another, toward the hallway. At the last moment, he detours toward the couch. Without looking at Rafferty, he pulls one hand from his pocket and reaches out and touches him on the shoulder lightly, just brushes him with the backs of his fingers.

As he goes down the hall, Rafferty hears him say, “The
hinges.
”