Rafferty suddenly recognizes the bitterness in her eyes. He has seen it in Miaow's. "He took care of you."
"He took me in. It started with visits when my parents were on vacation, and the visits got longer until finally I was living at his house. Nobody ever said much of anything, but when I went home one day, my mother had rearranged my room. I always slept under the window, because light came through it and I was afraid of the dark. My mother had pushed the bed against the wall. 'It looks much bigger this way,' she said. I was fourteen, and I said, 'It looks bigger because I'm not in it.'" A strangled laugh, rocks rattling in a can. "So I went back home. To Uncle Claus."
"Okay, so you're living with Uncle Claus. What took him to Bangkok?"
"He worked in oil in Saudi Arabia when he was young. He'd work there a few months and then spend a month here, decompressing, he said. He loved it here. When I went to college, he came to stay."
Rafferty hesitates for a moment, but he has to ask the question. "People usually stay in Bangkok for a reason. What was your uncle's reason?"
"I just told you. He loves it."
Not very specific, he thinks. "And what did he do here?"
"What does he do here, you mean." Her eyes roam the room, taking in the clientele, mostly affluent young Thais wearing designer clothes, some of them in the head-to-toe black of the world's terminally hip, although until recently Thais associated black primarily with funerals. "He helps out. He works with groups that do volunteer work with the homeless, especially kids. That's why that nice policeman thought you'd want to help, because of your little girl."
Thanks, Arthit. "Groups that work with kids," he writes. "Okay, so before he stopped calling. Did anything seem different? Did he talk about anything new?"
She studies the tabletop for a moment, then wipes her side of it with a napkin. "There was a maid. He hired her not too long ago. His calls were full of her. Doughnut was her name. Doughnut this, Doughnut that. He was crazy about her."
"There can't be that many girls named Doughnut." He doesn't even bother to write it down.
"I sort of hope not," Clarissa says. "But it's funny, because she hasn't answered the phone in his apartment since his calls stopped. She always answered before."
Doughnut, Rafferty thinks. "Two months ago the waves hit. Do you think there's any chance he went down to the coast?"
"That's what everybody asks. No. Uncle Claus is enormous. Not the bathing-suit type. And he burns in five minutes. I can't imagine why he'd go down there."
Rafferty can think of several possible reasons, all of them in the raunchier areas of Patong Beach on Phuket. "I'll check anyway. Have you been to his apartment?"
"I don't have a key."
She has turned to stare out the window and into the glare of the day, as though she hopes she will see her uncle stroll by.
"Somehow," Rafferty says, "I don't think that will be a problem."
9
Closets are always a good place to start. Claus Ulrich's closet contains a great many linen shirts, every color of the rainbow and a few that got left out in the interest of good taste. The labels proclaim that they are size XXL, ordered from an expensive catalog that pretends to sell clothing to the fashionable world traveler, the kind who puts on a bush jacket to watch the Discovery Channel. Ulrich has arranged the garments to hang bright to dark, a dandy's spectrum. To the right are ten or twelve carefully folded pairs of pleated linen slacks, waist size 46, all beige. Rafferty hears his mother's voice: Beige goes with anything.
But it had not, apparently, gone with Claus Ulrich when he passed through the front door with its surprising assembly of locks. Nor had the open suitcase containing a week's worth of lightweight clothes, stashed in the back of the closet. In writing his travel books, it has never once occurred to Rafferty to remind people not to forget their suitcase.
An hour in the apartment tells Rafferty several things. First, he is the only person to enter it in weeks. The air conditioner has been off all that time, letting the heat and damp attack the rug and drapes and corrupt the foam-rubber cushions of the couch. The smell is as dank as wet leaves, and the heat gives Rafferty a blinding headache.
The headache leads to a second discovery. Looking for an aspirin in the medicine cabinet, he finds a trove of painkillers that, taken cumulatively, could prepare an elephant for surgery. He swallows a couple of ibuprofen the size of jawbreakers and surveys the remainder of Claus Ulrich's pharmacopoeia: prescription drugs for indigestion, powerful antihistamines, and, most interesting of all, three bottles of nitroglycerine tablets, one of them with the protective seal broken. Claus Ulrich has a heart condition and he keeps the emergency remedy right at hand.
So why are the tablets here when Uncle Claus isn't? Rafferty goes back and rifles through the suitcase. An unopened bottle of nitroglycerine, sealed in a Ziploc bag, is folded carefully into a shirt.
In addition to chronic pain, indigestion, allergies, and an erratic heart, Claus Ulrich has both money and taste. It's terrible taste, and there's a lot of it on view. Ulrich's eye runs to the rococo: Wooden objects tend to be heavily gilded and intricately filigreed with curls, gewgaws, and little bulbous tumors that might be either bunches of grapes or the scrotal sac of some alien organism with ten or twelve testicles. The ornate furniture sits beneath walls that are heavily hung with massive gilt-framed mirrors and hand-painted reproductions of dark museum oils. Rafferty looks more closely and sees filmy nymphs of indeterminate sex, cavorting on swings in some sylvan setting that's probably slated for development. Taken tout ensemble, the room has the cosmetic appeal of a fever blister.
The only exceptions-the only things in the place Rafferty would allow within ten feet of his own front door-are two remarkable Khmer apsarases, winged angels, carved in sandstone and maybe eight hundred years old. They're ethereally beautiful, and Rafferty makes a note to talk with a dealer in Cambodian antiquities who works out of the Oriental Hotel.
Not exactly Aussie taste, Rafferty thinks. In his somewhat limited experience, Australian men run more toward dark hardwood and leather: Cut down some trees, skin a few cattle, hammer together a living room set, and hope it doesn't sprout branches. See if your dog tries to herd it.
There are five rooms, four of them twinkling densely with froufrou and bric-a-brac: living room, kitchen, den, and two bedrooms. In the den Rafferty learns that Uncle Claus is au courant with the computer age. A 1.8-gigahertz Dell with a flat-screen monitor sits incongruously on the nineteenth-century desk, a triumph of veneers and inlay. When Rafferty boots the machine, it defaults to Netscape, and a dial-up connection stakes out the screen and demands a password. Stacks of CD-ROM disks, Bangkok counterfeits of popular software programs, are slotted in a four-foot-high plastic storage tower. There's a lot more software, Rafferty thinks, than most people would need: four word-processing programs, two spreadsheets, three graphics suites, several project planners, even two programs for writing screenplays. About fifteen games. He pokes the storage tower with an index finger, making it wobble. Why would anyone need four word-processing programs?
He turns off the computer and gives the desk's single drawer a cursory rummage. Uncle Claus is a neat freak. He bundles business cards with a rubber band, alphabetized by company. Paper clips are segregated by size. Forty or fifty sheets of blank letterhead proclaim something called AT Enterprises, but there is no correspondence. His monthly bills are tied neatly in annual bundles. The bills are moderately interesting: He's spending a fortune on the phone but not calling long distance, so either he's incurably chatty or he spends a lot of time online. There's also an invoice from a company called Bangkok Domestics. Rafferty puts that one in his pocket.