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.