She swivels in her chair and turns on the television set. It blossoms into electronic snow until she pushes a button on the remote. "He took a few of these," she says, waiting for the picture. "But the camera was too bulky, and he couldn't work it with a remote, so he had to stop playing with us to make the video." The familiar room blinks onto the screen. "But he took this one because it was special."
The image is mercifully low-resolution, the product of a cheap video camera from more than twenty years ago. A small naked brown girl, barely recognizable as Doughnut, is on the red coverlet. Her wrists have been tied to her ankles, which are separated by metal cuffs with a two-foot rod between them. The bindings open and lift her legs and arms, leaving her splayed and helpless on her back.
A slightly larger girl, also naked, enters the picture from the left. She is already crying.
"Toom," Doughnut says.
Toom sits on the bed next to Doughnut and gently reaches over to smooth her sister's hair, which is plastered with sweat to her face. The camera jumps, and Toom yanks her arm back as though Doughnut were a live wire. Then, jerkily, the camera moves in on the two girls. Doughnut has her eyes closed, and her face is vacant, almost otherworldly, but Toom watches with enormous eyes as the camera advances on her.
A hand comes into the frame, holding a lighted cigar. The hand is shaking, and Rafferty realizes that the camera is shaking, too. Claus Ulrich is excited.
Toom waves the cigar away and hangs her head. The hand disappears and comes back without the cigar, and then it moves too fast for the camera to track and backhands Toom across the face. Toom's face snaps around, the short hair flying, and she is knocked sideways across Doughnut. Doughnut's eyes remain closed. When the hand reenters the frame, it has the cigar in it again.
Without opening her eyes, Doughnut says something to her sister.
This time, very slowly, Toom takes it. With the cigar pressed between the first and second fingers of her right hand, she does the best she can to make a very high wai to her sister, who has opened her eyes.
Doughnut smiles at her.
"Turn it off," Rafferty says. His voice is a rasp. He has looked away from the screen, but he doesn't even want the images in his peripheral vision.
"It goes on for quite a while," Doughnut says, snapping the set off. "Although at the time it seemed much longer."
Rafferty reaches reflexively for another cigarette, catches himself.
"So, two nights later, I broke a window and went out through it. Cut myself here." She swipes at the scar on her chin. "I had to do it, for Toom. She hadn't stopped crying since she hurt me. I thought she was going to cry herself to death. I couldn't help her while I was inside, so I got out. My first night out, I met Coke on the street."
"Coke?"
"The short one," she says, indicating the vanished men with her chin. "He was little, but he liked me, and he helped me. And he had something I needed."
"What?" Coke and Doughnut.
"A gun." She brings the black eyes up to his, as though to make sure he is listening. "I had to get Toom out, so I needed a gun. I didn't know they had cut her to get even with me for escaping. Cut her here." She raises a leg and draws a quick line across her Achilles tendon.
The flopping foot. "Who did?"
"The two Chinese men."
"I'm surprised you didn't go after them, too."
Doughnut stubs out her half-smoked cigarette on the tabletop, being very careful to fold it over neatly before she drops it on the floor. She looks down at it and twists her shoe on it, killing it dead.
"Well, sure," Rafferty says. Despite his mounting revulsion-at what he has seen, at what she has done-he can't help seeing her as Miaow grown up, a Miaow for whom things had gone differently, things over which she had no control. The plain brown face, the dark hair, the knife-edge part. He realizes she is talking.
"…finally, Lee, the one who liked to beat the girls, drove her out and took her to a number hotel, and I got off Coke's motorcycle and walked into the parking lot, just as Lee got out of the car. I shot him there, and we took Toom. When I saw her foot, I decided to kill Kwan, too." She lets her chin fall onto her chest, the first time she has betrayed anything like exhaustion. "And I did, about eight months later." She sounds as calm as someone describing what she had for dinner. "A week after my twelfth happy birthday. Then I went off with Toom and Coke, and we made a life."
As she describes it, it had not been a conventional household. Coke robbed people and sent Doughnut to school with the money he stole, while Toom kept house. Doughnut learned English and computer skills and thought about Claus.
"How did you find him?"
"I didn't. I just saw him on the street. Big as ever. Just walking along, like a real person. You want to hear something funny? I was terrified." She brings her right hand to her heart and taps, twice. "Terrified. He was exactly the same. He looked at me like I wasn't there, and I realized he didn't know who I was. I smiled at him." She fiddles with the package of cigarettes and then pushes it aside. "I think that was the hardest thing, that smile, that I ever did. He nodded and walked right past. So I turned around and followed him, and then I knew where he lived. Easy. I could hardly believe it."
"I think I know some of the rest of it," Rafferty says. He tells her what he has learned about Noot and Bangkok Domestics and Madame Wing. "So you got in, and there you were. In that apartment. Just you and Claus."
She nods. Then she reaches up and smooths her hair.
"How did you stand it?"
Her fingers find the cigarettes again, and she takes one out without looking at it. "No problem. It was almost fun. I was nice to him. I cooked and cleaned and took care of him like he was a big, fat, ugly, smelly baby. He stank of meat. He had hair on his back, like a monkey. He poured sweet stuff all over himself because he smelled so bad. I told him he was handsome. Why do men always believe they are handsome? I made him love me. He called me his little sugar doughnut." She spits the English words like hard seeds, as though she expects them to bounce on the table. "I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to think I loved him. Like Toom loved me, like somebody sometime must have loved all those girls he hurt. It was necessary for him to think I loved him."
"Because it wasn't enough just to kill him."
She places the unlit cigarette between her index fingers as though she is measuring it and looks at him over it. "Would you think it was enough?"
Rafferty does not answer, just regards the small, dark, harmless-looking girl sitting opposite him in her pastel clothes. Looks at the clean, cropped nails; the bright, childish plastic bracelet; the meticulously brushed hair. Looks at the child tied to the bed. Doughnut.
Who could have been Miaow.
She returns his gaze impassively and lets the cigarette fall to the table. "Well, it wasn't. First he had to trust me. Then he had to love me. Then he had to do something good, just once in his life."
"He already had," Rafferty says. "Clarissa. The niece."
She moves her head to one side, dodging the words. "For me. He had to do something for me, so he could feel good about himself. Feel good about being alive."
"Jesus," Rafferty says.
"So I borrowed money from him. I told him my family needed it, which was true. I gave him some time to feel what it was like to be good, to be proud of himself. I gave him a week, thanked him every day. Told him he had saved my mama's life by buying medicine for her. He was so proud of himself that he went on a diet. Then I fell in my bathroom. I screamed. He ran in to help me. Feeling like a hero. I'd thought about where to do it while I polished all that furniture. I needed him to be in the bathroom."
"For cleanup." He is watching her eyes, trying to see the person behind them. Only when she catches him and glances down does he see a crack in the surface, a vulnerability in the shell.