Rafferty watches the routine for the thousandth time. "Half the Thai women I know open cigarettes that way," he says, "and I've never been able to figure out why."
"When you arrived here, you smoked," Rose reminds him, lighting up.
"I actually recall things that far back, Rose," he says. "It's the short-term memory that's going."
"And when you went into a bar, you put the pack on the table in front of you, wide open the American way, with a great big hole in it. What happened then?"
"Women hit me up for cigarettes," Rafferty says.
"Every girl in the bar. Even the ones who didn't smoke. It's all part of getting as much as possible from the farang. That's what that whole life is about."
"But the way you open them-"
"It just makes it harder for people to take them away from me," she says. "These things cost money."
Money is a sore subject with Rose, whose earnings took a vertical nosedive when she quit dancing go-go and went into cleaning apartments. Now she is trying to start a cleaning business, recruiting women from the bars who are either too old to attract customers or just want out of the life. It's slow going. The women may want to quit the bars, but for years most of them have never washed anything but their hair. Even with occasional help from Rafferty-he put up eight hundred dollars, one-fifth of his savings account, for 20 percent of the business-Rose has intermittent bouts of despair.
"So the boy only bit you once," Rafferty says, changing the subject. "I suppose that's encouraging."
"It's not women he has a problem with." She blows a funnel of smoke with enormous satisfaction.
"Who knows who he has a problem with? Given that he's probably killed somebody and he's alone with Miaow in her room right now."
"They're friends," Rose says soothingly. "You think too much."
"The inevitable Thai response. My daughter's shut up in a room with an incipient homicidal maniac who's got an aura like a forest fire, and you tell me I think too much."
"Miaow is tough," Rose says. "She got along without you for years, and now you're right here in the next room with your ears pointing up like a guard dog. Just sit back and relax."
"Did he say anything at all to you?"
"It seems to me," Rose says, folding her long legs under her, "that the one who owes you an explanation is Miaow."
"Later," Rafferty says. "That's what she said: 'Later.'"
"It's later now," Rose points out.
"It sure as hell is," Rafferty says, getting up.
Rose gazes up at him in mock adoration and bats her eyelashes, which are lush enough to kick up a breeze. "You're so masterful."
"I really don't know what I'd do, Rose," Rafferty says, "without you on hand to supply the play-by-play."
"The what-by-what?"
"American expression." He crosses the room. "Play-by-play. It refers to one big, slow, dumb guy and one little, fast, dumb guy who tell you what's going on at sporting events."
She lifts a hand to slow his exit. "While you're feeling so chatty, what did Arthit want?"
"He wants to owe me a favor. There's an Australian woman who's lost an uncle here in Thailand."
Rose taps the cigarette once, and the ash falls dead center in the ashtray. "Is she a blonde?"
"She's a blonde in the same way Miaow's a child. Do I hear an undercurrent of jealousy?"
"Thai women don't trust their men with blondes."
"I'm your man," Rafferty says. "That sounds nice."
"Don't change the subject. You were going into Miaow's room, remember? I'll clean up," Rose says, doing a languid rise from the couch, "while you lay down the law."
The Crayola frowny face is hanging on the doorknob of Miaow's room, usually a sign that entry is strictly forbidden. She designed both it and its counterpart, the smiley face that means "Come right in," shortly after moving into the room that had been Rafferty's office. Rafferty pauses at the door, listens and hears nothing, and then knocks softly.
He waits a moment, opens the door a few inches, and peeks in. Miaow sits on the lower bunk with Superman's head in her lap. He is fast asleep. One arm dangles down to the carpet in graceful, tapering planes. It looks like Michelangelo's Pieta would look if the Pieta depicted two small brown children.
Miaow gazes up at him as though from a great distance. Her eyes are shining with happiness. They seem to look through him. Very slowly, she lifts a hand from the boy's head and places an upraised finger to her lips. "Shhhhh," she whispers, more a breath than anything else.
7
The man who called himself Chon sits alone at a table. The open-air restaurant is dim and deserted. His shiny new watch-bought to help him track time on the night he and Tam dug up the safe-says 3:48 A.M., and even Bangkok slows down to catch its breath at that hour. The single waitress is asleep on a chair, and he sees no reason to wake her. He isn't hungry. He just needs a smooth, horizontal surface for half an hour or so.
A pad of blue-lined paper lies open in front of him, and a clutch of cheap ballpoint pens bristles from his pocket. He had been worried that he would write so many drafts that his pen would run out of ink, so he went to two stores, buying the pens in one and the paper in the other, at the busiest time of day. A black three-ring notebook sits beside the paper.
In the end, though, the note has proved very simple to write. He has copied it twice to make sure it is legible, because his nervousness makes his hand shake. Even writing her a letter frightens him.
Or perhaps he is just tired. He has not slept in the same room twice since the night of the buried safe. For the first few days, he stayed in the Chinatown district, but the noise in the narrow streets made it impossible for him to sleep, not that he sleeps well even when it is quiet. He has not slept well for almost twenty years. Now he makes his futile grabs at sleep in firetrap fifty-baht flophouses, one more anonymous pauper.
Other than a thin sheaf of Thai money, he carries nothing but the pens, the paper, and the notebook. If he is killed, as he almost certainly will be, there will be nothing to say who he was. Just as well, he thinks, because he is not anyone anymore.
What is left of his life, his reason for being alive, is in that notebook.
He regrets having shot Tam. If the man hadn't looked at the photos, he'd be alive now. Once he saw them, though, he couldn't be allowed to live. He might have tried to play the angles. He might have gone to her.
Still, Chon has relived many times the moment when the gun coughed in his grip and Tam dropped into the water, one hand uplifted for help. The hand haunts Chon. Although he has seen thousands of deaths, although he is saturated with death and can sometimes smell death on his skin, he has never killed before and never thought he would.
If a fortune-teller had told him twenty-five years ago-when he had a home, a wife, children, a violin, and two good hands-that he would now be planning the total destruction of another human being, he would have laughed out loud. But he couldn't have known then that there would come a time when destroying someone would be all he had in the world.
He knows who he is now, but he has no idea what has become of the man he was. It seems to him that man is dead and he is the ghost that remains.
From the notebook he takes a copy of one of the photos from the safe. He puts it behind the letter and aligns them, tapping the edges on the tabletop. He realizes he has forgotten to buy a stapler. Unbidden, the thought washes over him: What else have I forgotten?
Contemplating the next part of his plan, he breaks into a sweat even in the cool evening air. He will have to get close to her at least once. It will be very difficult for him to force himself to be anywhere near her. She is terror itself to him.