A Nail Through the Heart (28 page)

T
oadface and Skeletor flank her wheelchair like a pair of mismatched tutelary figures guarding a throne. Madame Wing raises her chin.

“You stink,” Madame Wing says.

“Yeah, but I can take a shower,” Rafferty replies shakily. “What are your options?”

She perches in the chair, more batlike than ever, sharp knees drawn up to her chest. The inevitable blanket covers her legs, but her feet protrude from the bottom edge. She has prehensile feet—long, thin toes with narrow, yellowish nails that extend far enough to curl downward, long enough to break if she had to walk. They are the ugliest feet Rafferty has ever seen. It gives him a cold twinge of comfort that she has had to live with such hideous feet.

Skeletor—Nick—leaves her side to circle him, keeping his distance, and shuts the door. He positions himself with his back to it.

Rafferty leans against the wall, his joints too loose and his bones too heavy, his body too big and bulky to move. Pain radiates out from
a dozen places where he was hit. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” he says.

“Change of plans,” says Toadface.

“So I see.” Rafferty draws a deep breath and blows it out. “How you doing, you merciless old bitch?” he asks Madame Wing.

She knocks the insult away with a knot of knuckles. “Where is the man who took my money?”

“You’ll never know.” He can’t tell the truth. He knows she can reach Chouk in jail, as easily as stretching out a hand and slapping him.

“Oh,” she says comfortably, “I think I will.”

“Yeah? What’s the plan? You going to kiss me?”

She almost smiles. “We’re going to wait,” she says.

“For what?”

Madame Wing slips a hand beneath the blanket and comes out with a piece of paper. He can see the bright colors through the back of the sheet even before she turns it around to face him. It is one of Miaow’s new drawings, a family group of four: Rafferty, Rose, Superman, and herself. It seems to him to have been months since she drew it. “Until the children come home,” she says.

There is a hot pressure in Rafferty’s chest that he recognizes as terror. “They won’t come home,” he says.

“Really.” She is undisturbed. “And why not?”

“The boy’s gone,” he says. “Miaow won’t leave school until I go get her.”

“The school called,” she says. “About three minutes ago, because you hadn’t shown up. And one of these gentlemen told them to put her in a taxi and send her here. And they will. The Thais are not careful people. They put too much faith in the future.”

“It’s too late for you,” he says.

“Is it?” There is not a trace of interest in her face.

“The pictures. They’re already at the
Bangkok Post.
They’ll be on the Internet by this time tomorrow.”

“I’m sure they’ll be popular.” She drops Miaow’s drawing to the floor. It lands right side up near the wheel of her chair, the bright, cheerful picture facing Rafferty. “The
Post
won’t publish them. The
laws of libel are almost the only laws the Thais enforce. What do they show? A young woman. She could be anyone.”

“You underestimate your ugliness.”

Her whole head snaps forward, quick as a cobra. “You have no idea what I’ve survived,” she says. “Do you honestly think
you
can make an end of me? You, with your cheap apartment, your sad little life. I am as far beyond you as the stars.”

“Those whom the gods would destroy,” Rafferty says, “they first give weak dialogue.”

She does not even pause. “You will disappear so completely that no one will even bother to look. Who would miss you? Especially since the child will be gone, too.” She rests the terrible hands on her knees, a bundle of brown twigs, the nest of some predatory bird.

“You guys really on board for this?” Rafferty asks. “You going to hurt a kid?”

“If necessary,” says Nick.

“And you,” Rafferty says to Chut. “You have a daughter of your own.”

Chut starts to reply, then stops. He looks away.

“She paying you a lot?”

Nick says, “A lot more than we could have gotten from selling her.”

“The only person in the world who can identify me is the man you are hiding,” Madame Wing says. “Tell me where he is, and we’ll let the child live.”

“I wouldn’t shit on you if you needed the ballast.”

“Be as brave as you like. Do you know how many thousand times I’ve been through this? It’s always the same. I can predict every stage you’ll go through. First you’ll refuse to tell us anything. Then you’ll lie. When the lies don’t stop us, you’ll tell us what we want to know. Then, at the last, you’ll say anything—
anything
—to make us stop. You’ll tell us where your mother is. You’ll beg us to hurt the little girl instead of you. Do you think there were no brave men and women in Cambodia? There were thousands of them. Do you know how many of them refused to talk to me in the end? None of them. Not one.”

“I know what ‘none’ means.”

“Save yourself the pain,” she says, settling back in the chair. “In the end it will be the same anyway, except that you will have suffered and the child will die. Where is he?”

“On an airplane.”

Her eyes widen and narrow again. “A lie. I’m not going to bargain any further. I’ve given you all I’m going to give. A quick answer from you and we’ll be gone before the child arrives. Once she comes through that door, she’s dead, I promise you.”

Rafferty turns to stare at Chut, who averts his eyes. “These guys haven’t got the stones for it.”

“It’s remarkable,” she says complacently, “how many people turn out to have the stones, as you say. There was no shortage of willing hands in Tuol Sleng. It’s like heroism. You have no idea what people can do until they do it. One of my best helpers was a boy who cried at sad movies.”

“He’s on a plane,” Rafferty says again. “On his way to Hong Kong.”

A tightening of the skin over the bones of her face. “Using what for money?”

“Obviously, yours.”

Madame Wing looks at the others. “Does anyone here believe that?”

“He’s working for free?” Nick says. The thin lips twist. “I don’t think so.”

“Listen,” Rafferty says. “He’s gone. He can’t hurt you now. Killing me is just going to complicate your life. The police—”

“The police?” She waves a twisted hand at Nick and Chut. “The police are already here. They’ve been taking care of me for years. The police are not a problem. The
problem
is that you’re not taking this seriously enough. Nobody really believes they’re going to be hurt. They think we’ll stop at some point before it gets awful.” She leans toward him, boring in on him with those light-gathering eyes. “But we don’t.” She turns to the skeletal Nick. “Remove his trousers.”

Rafferty starts to move, but Nick raises his hand, and it comes
up with the automatic in it. The man’s eyes are unsteady, flickering toward Chut and away again, but the pistol does not waver. It points straight at Rafferty’s belly. “Take them off,” Nick says.

“You can’t actually shoot me,” Rafferty says to Madame Wing with more certainty than he feels. “You want information.”

Nick snaps a round into the chamber.

“Of course he can shoot you,” Madame Wing says, and then she says to Nick, “Aim at the knees.”

“Wait,” Rafferty says. “You guys—listen, I’ll give you the deed to her house. It’s worth a hundred times what she’s paying you.”

Chut looks at Nick and then at Madame Wing.

“It’s a forgery,” she says.

“Afraid not,” Rafferty says. “I sent you the forgery.”

He has the brief pleasure of seeing the rage flare in her eyes, but then she wills it away. “We’ll get the deed, too, after you tell us what we want to know.” She tucks the blanket over her feet. “And, just for that, we’re not going to wait. We’ll get started and let the child walk in on us. Surprise her.” She reaches beneath the blanket again, and when she brings her hands up, they have a thin black zippered case in them. “Which airline?” she says, unzipping the case.

“I don’t know.”

“What flight number? What time did it leave Bangkok?” The case is open now. A row of straight razors gleams against the black leather, arranged precisely from large to small. “Get him moving,” she says. “I want him on the couch.” She pries a razor from the case with her knotted fingers and opens it. It has a curved back, and there are nicks in the sharp straight edge. “This one isn’t as sharp as I’d like it—no, as
you’d
like it to be. Tell me the flight number, and I’ll use a sharper one.”

“I don’t know the flight number.”

“Assuming he’s even on a plane, which I don’t believe for a moment. The couch,” she says to the man with the pistol in his hand. “Get his trousers down and get him on the couch.”

Nick walks around behind Rafferty and punches him between the shoulder blades. Rafferty takes two steps toward the couch, the man following a step behind, and there’s a sound at the front door.

The knob turns, the clicking noise audible to them all. The door begins to open.

Rafferty raises a heavy boot and brings it down on Nick’s instep. The man gasps and takes a quick jump backward, and Rafferty drops to his knees, rolls with the momentum, and comes up with the automatic in his hand, swinging the barrel around toward Nick, who is backing up fast.

The door opens, and Rose comes in.

She stands there, blinking for a moment, and Chut moves behind her and closes the door. Suddenly there is a gun in Chut’s hand, too. All Rafferty can hear is his own breathing.

“Put down the gun,” Madame Wing says. “You can’t kill all of us. Chut, if he doesn’t drop the gun, shoot the woman.”

Chut brings his gun around to Rose and licks his lips. “Sort of a standoff, isn’t it?” he says.

“Actually,” Rafferty says, “no.” And he draws the deepest breath of his life, swivels, and shoots Madame Wing twice.

At first he thinks she is trying to get out of the room. He hears the metallic animal squeal of the wheels as the chair rolls back, and then she throws up a hand and the chair tips backward and goes down, partially folding sideways as it falls. The blanket flies into the air and settles, in what seems to Rafferty to be slow motion, over Madame Wing’s face. She coughs, and her left foot kicks once and then collapses against the edge of the lopsided chair.

“You’re the one who said it,” Rafferty says to Rose. He has to swallow twice. “There are people who should die.”

Nick and Chut stand with their guns dangling at their sides, pointed at the floor, looking like men who have lost a winning lottery ticket. Rose comes slowly the rest of the way into the room, ignoring the two of them completely. Avoiding Rafferty’s eyes, she stands over Madame Wing until it is clear she is not going to move. “I’m smoking a cigarette,” she says to no one in particular, and then, very suddenly, she sits on the floor. She turns her head so she is not facing Madame Wing and begins to ransack her purse.

Chut has opened his mouth wide to clear the sound of the shots in the small room.

“You’ve still got your buyer,” Rafferty says. He sits on the couch, which seems to be a very long way down, so far he thinks for an instant he has missed it. His body folds forward until his hands touch the carpet. He lets the gun fall from his fingers. He hears a match strike, and Rose’s smoke tickles his nostrils. “There really is a buyer, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” says Chut, looking regretfully down at Madame Wing.

Rafferty leans back against the couch and closes his eyes. The room tilts, wheels around him, and rights itself. “Then get her out of here and sell her,” he says. “And if she’s gone before my daughter gets home, I’ll give you the deed to her house.”

A
rthit says, “Give me the phone.”

Rafferty hands it over with gratitude. Clarissa has kept her promise to call to say good-bye, and he has been unable to think of a single thing to tell her.

“I need to talk to you about your uncle,” Arthit says after identifying himself. He does not look at Rafferty. He is speaking his best English, British-clipped and stiff as a pig’s bristle. He wears a polo shirt that Claus Ulrich’s catalog would probably call “color-free” and a new pair of plaid trousers, bright enough to light a ballroom.

Rafferty can hear a question on Clarissa’s end, and Arthit says, “He was working for us. He was a very valuable asset.”

Privately Rafferty thinks Arthit has been reading too much John le Carré, but he leans back on the slashed couch and keeps his opinion to himself. An hour with a household cleanser that stank of ammonia has deleted the smear of eggs from the wall, and a throw rug covers the wet spot from which he’d scrubbed Madame Wing’s blood. He’d
gotten up from the mutilated bed around four in the morning, the third time he’d dreamed about killing her, and moved the rug from the kitchen.

That leaves only the rest of the apartment to clean up. Sitting uselessly on the floor, he begins to gather the couch’s stuffing.

“As you probably know, the commercial abuse of women in Asia is a serious problem, a failure of international policy. Cultural issues enter into it as well, the relative value to Asian society of men and women.” Arthit’s eyes are closed. He seems intentionally to be choosing the driest language available without actually resorting to footnotes, but Rafferty gives it a second thought and decides it’s probably brilliant. Anything more personal would not be half so convincing.

“So for us to have someone who was European, or at least Australian, who was mobile, who could cross borders…” He waits again, as Clarissa talks. Rafferty can’t make out the words, but her voice is pitched high.

“Of course,” Arthit says. “He was invaluable. Once he’d established his cover, buying all that awful pornography, he could position himself as a serious customer. He could gain their trust, something none of us could have hoped to do.

“We made arrests,” Arthit says. He is sitting sideways on the ravaged sofa, gazing at the spot above it where the egg smear used to be. “I can say without hesitation that one Chinese gang has been put completely out of business, at least indirectly because of your Uncle Claus.” This is not only a clincher, Rafferty thinks; it has the added merit of being true. In a way.

“Yes, my dear,” Arthit says, his eyes flicking to Rafferty. “He was a hero, of sorts. And what happened to him—well, it probably didn’t happen in Thailand. We think he was most likely in Laos when they got to him. We may never know exactly.”

He listens again. “It’s my pleasure,” he says. “No one wants to think badly of someone we love after they’re gone. There’s no way for them to explain.” His eyes find Rafferty again, and he shrugs. “Yes, yes. So please don’t be too harsh on us. And have a good flight.” He hangs up.

The two of them sit in silence for a moment, Rafferty with both hands full of cottony stuffing. Arthit looks out through the balcony window at the darkening sky, slowly going a sullen lead gray. “I guess the sun has called it a day.”

“And who has a better right?” Rafferty asks, and immediately regrets his tone. He jams the stuffing into one of the slits in the couch, picks up some more, and drops it again, trying to exhale several liters of mixed emotions. “Thank you, Arthit.”

Arthit pats his belly. “You said something about dinner.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Rafferty gets up stiffly, feeling battered and drained and older than he intends to be at death. “I thought we’d cook it out on the balcony.”

“Probably a good idea, since I’d hate to think of you anywhere near a stove. You’d probably end up with your head in the oven. What’s on the menu?”

“Man food,” Rafferty says with a relish he does not feel. “Steaks.”

“With what?”

“What do you mean, with what? They’re big steaks.”

“Where are Miaow and Rose?”

“At Rose’s. Being girls together. And staying out of Superman’s way.” He doesn’t add that Rose left to intercept Miaow after the shooting without speaking to him. It seems to take him fifteen minutes to get to the kitchen. He opens the refrigerator and pulls out the steaks, two of Foodland’s biggest, cut specially for the occasion. “How do you want yours?”

“Just breathe on it a couple of times,” Arthit says, hitching his blinding trousers by way of preparing to rise. “I’ll bet there’s a beer somewhere.”

“Heineken. Just for you.”

“It is manifestly a perfect world,” Arthit says.

“THE VICTIMS WERE
guilty,” Rafferty says. “And the murderers were innocent.”

Arthit drains his fourth green bottle. “I hate when that happens.”

They are sitting on folding chairs on the balcony, looking out over the Bangkok night. Most of Rafferty’s steak is still on the plate, sheened over with cold fat. The coals, coated with powdery ash now, are settling into the hibachi. Rafferty reaches over with the barbecue fork and pokes them, producing a small explosion of sparks. He leaves the tines of the fork buried in the pile of coals, as he used to do when he was a child in California, trying to heat the tines until they glow.

“And the boy?” Arthit asks.

“Gone. But he said he’d be back, to get Miaow.”

“Then you’ll have another chance with him, won’t you?” He glances over at Rafferty, assessing the damage to his face. “The apartment looks terrible,” he says.

“Really? I had it redone just for tonight.”

“You look terrible, too.”

“I ran into a door.”

“That’s a lot of damage for—”

“It was a revolving door.”

“If it’s any comfort, there are a couple of police generals who look worse,” Arthit says, ignoring Rafferty’s evasion. “Since Madame Wing’s body was pulled from the river, they look like someone just cut their pay in half, which is probably accurate. Confusing world, isn’t it? Even someone as wretched as she was will be missed.”

“Confusing doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s like learning that all the maps were just made up at random, that they don’t correspond to anything. Directions are a polite fiction. There’s no such thing as north. Did you know, Arthit, that we ‘orient’ maps to the north because early mapmakers arbitrarily put Asia at the top of their maps? We’ve been going in the wrong direction for centuries. For all we know, that goddamned wave wanted to hit California.”

“I’ve always thought a sense of direction was overrated,” Arthit says, “since everything’s pretty much the same everywhere.”

“Well, I thought I had one. Take Madame Wing. I oriented myself toward her for a time because that’s where I thought Doughnut was. Typical Bangkok two-step: Start out in one direction, sidestep, and suddenly you don’t know who you’re dancing with.”

Arthit slides his eyes over at Rafferty and then out at the black Bangkok sky. A thin, high layer of clouds obscures the stars, making heaven as blank and featureless as a faulty memory, or the proverbial clean slate. The night is hot and still. “That thing about the Orient. Where’d you learn that?”

“A book.”

“Gosh. Reading a lot lately?”

“One corker after another.” Rafferty straightens his legs in front of him, looking down at his bare feet, almost the only unmarked parts of his body. “One of the nice things about books,” he says, “is that they have endings.”

Arthit says, “In case no one has told you, Poke, life has an ending.”

“A KID WHO’S
vanished back to the street,” Rafferty says. “A very nice murderer in jail. A missing Australian who will apparently remain missing throughout the rest of this geological age, whatever they’ve named it.
His
murderer missing. Not exactly a tidy resolution.”

Arthit glances at him and then away again. “The pseudonymous Doughnut. Disappeared, has she?”

“Without a trace.”

“If she’d left a trace, Poke, she wouldn’t have disappeared. She’d just be temporarily occluded.”

“It’s a good thing I like you,” Rafferty says, “because if I didn’t, you’d be unbearable.”

“One thing that might interest you. Your two friends on the police force both resigned this morning.”

“Well, they weren’t really cut out for the job, were they? Did they give any explanation?”

“Real estate,” Arthit says. “They’re going into real estate.”

“I thought it took capital to get into real estate.”

“Well, apparently they have some.” Arthit picks up the bone left from his steak, gives it a once-over, and drops it back onto the plate. “There are some things it’s good not to look into too closely.”

Rafferty is watching ash glaze over the glow inside the coals.

“Everybody, especially everybody in the West, thinks the guilty are guilty and the innocent are innocent,” Arthit says. “Okay, so there are a few people who are just plain guilty. Madame Wing is a good example. Then there are an approximately equal number of people who are just plain innocent. I know three or four, and so do you. Everybody else is somewhere in the middle, trying to muddle through it all. After spending most of my life as a policeman, I still believe that most people are as good as they know how to be.”

“Based on what evidence?”

“Little things, big things. On the big side, say, Angkor or Chartres.”

“You could just as easily say those are ego. The old big-buildings-equal-big-dicks theory.”

“No.” Arthit puts his beer down and picks up Rafferty’s. “They’re aspiration. Spirit carved in rock. An enormous attempt over hundreds of years to express something that people feel deeply but don’t know how to talk about. Something that’s in the center of most of us, turned into millions of tons of stone. Ego—well, Albert Speer’s designs for the Third Reich, those were ego. Ego pure and simple. The Brandenburg Gate, the Chrysler Building—those are aspiration.”

“I don’t know. More evidence.”

“My wife’s eyes,” Arthit says. “Miaow’s face.” He reaches over and punches Rafferty on the thigh, harder, Rafferty hopes, than he intended to. “Friendship.”

Rafferty grasps the handle of the fork. It has grown warm to the touch. “You got me,” he says.

“You’re such an unconvincing cynic,” Arthit says. “I don’t know why you even bother to try.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.”

“You know what a cynic is?”

“Yes, Arthit. A cynic is a disappointed romantic.”

“A cynic is someone who’s been on the train too long.”

“The train,” Rafferty says, and waits for it.

“I’ve always wondered why people travel by train,” Arthit says. “Trains invariably pass through the shabbiest, most wretched parts
of cities. To someone who lived his entire life on a train, the world would seem to be long stretches of emptiness occasionally interrupted by patches of ugliness. Once in a while, you need to get off the train and see what the world’s really like.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You’ve been on an unusually long train ride—”

“All
right,
Arthit. You don’t have to hammer it into my skull.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He slaps Rafferty’s empty bottle against his palm. “Westerners seem to have difficulty with metaphors. I’ve often wondered whether it has something to do with the frontal lobe. Your heads are shaped so oddly.”

“Tell it to Isaac Newton.”

“You’re going to adopt a child, Poke,” Arthit says in a tone of gentle reproof. “You’re going to be in charge of her universe, at least until she’s old enough to take charge of it herself. You need to work on your worldview. And hers, too, since it’s not the same as yours.”

“I’m learning about that.”

“And Rose’s.” He plucks at the crease of his pants. “How does she explain all this?”

“Hungry ghosts.”

“See? Nothing even close to what you’ve probably come up with.”

“Do you believe in them?”

“Hungry ghosts? Oh, yes indeed. The world is full of them.”

“Then how—” Rafferty begins. “Hell. Okay, the world is swarming with hungry ghosts. How do I protect my wife and child? War and famine and pestilence and random malice, I’m comfortable with those. You can see them and smell them. I sort of know what to do about them. But this other stuff…”

“Don’t be silly. You’re making a family. You’ll
love
them. You’ll do things for them. You’ll hold them when they need it and let them hold you when you need it. You’ll listen to them when they try to educate you. Life is stronger than death when there’s love in it. And along the way you’ll change. Nothing changes a really putrid worldview like doing something good for someone who needs it.”

“You big cream puff.”

“I
do
have a soft center,” Arthit says, “and I’m proud of it.”

A cool wind suddenly materializes, brightening the coals and soothing Rafferty’s raw and battered skin. “My God,” he says. “A breeze.”

Arthit lifts his face to it and breathes deeply. He closes his eyes. “If life were any better,” he says, “we could sell tickets.”

FOR THE SECOND
night in a row, sleep won’t come. After two hours or so, he simply settles back and lets the feelings bombard him. They pummel him from every direction, riddling him, blowing holes in his consciousness like cosmic rays, except that the particles seem to be the size of basketballs.

Even with the air-conditioning at full, he is perspiring. When the sheets on his bed become damp, he gets up and moves back to the couch. He fits into its new lumps and valleys as though he’s been sleeping there for years and gazes out through the sliding door. A high, thin fog has settled over the city like ash, like the settling coals on the balcony, probably cold by now. Something seems to have burned out inside him, too.

He doesn’t know whether it’s something he can ever light again.

He is mentally rewriting his relationship with the boy, playing an especially agonizing game of “what if,” when he hears the whispers at the door. He reaches automatically for the gun, realizes it’s not there, and gets up, wrapping the sheet over his shoulders. Before he can make it to the door, it opens.