He hauls himself to a sitting position. “Give me a number,” he says.
She recites a phone number, and he hangs up in the middle of it. He sits there, feeling the edge of sleep recede like the shoreline of a country he’s been forced to leave. The phone begins to ring again, and he pulls the jack out. This silences it in the bedroom, but he can hear it chirping away in the living room. He wraps himself in his robe as though it were a grievance and goes through the bedroom door, into the stuffy heat of the living room.
The air conditioners in the bedrooms make sleep possible in the hot season, which this year seems to be twelve months long, but it makes little sense to cool the living room when no one is in it. The door to the balcony is closed, and the air is heavy with the stink of Rose’s cigarettes. For the thousandth time in his life with her, Rafferty wonders why cigarette smoke smells so much worse in the morning than it does at night. At night it has a sort of sinful razzle to it, but in the daytime it smells as toxic as asbestos. He goes to the sliding glass door and opens it. The clouds responsible for the previous evening’s drizzle have thinned to a high, pale ghosting, semitransparent as a film across the sky, a brilliant chromium heat-yellow in the east, but still a sleepy, pillow-feather gray to the west. As he checks his watch-6:25?-the phone rings again. Or, more accurately, it chirps like the world’s biggest, most aggressive cricket, the ring tone Miaow programmed into it.
He glares at it, but it doesn’t explode, so he goes into the kitchen.
He has taken lately to grinding the coffee beans before he goes to bed, not so much because of the noise the grinder makes in the morning, since nothing short of a collision with an asteroid would wake Rose, but as a way of shortening the amount of time it takes him to get the first gulp of coffee into his system. All he has to do now is turn on the pot, pour bottled water into the reservoir, and then stand there in suspended animation while the coffee drips. And drips. And drips.
The phone rings four more times as he waits, his forehead pressed against the cool of the refrigerator door. As he pours his first cup, it begins again. He ignores it, sipping the hot liquid and waiting for the daily miracle, the renewal of consciousness and judgment and volition, that coffee always brings. At the twenty-fourth ring, the phone stops.
And, with the chirping silenced, he hears his cell phone ringing. The surge from the coffee gives him the energy to go into the living room and check the display, which says ARTHIT.
His throat tightens as the previous night comes back to him. Noi’s stash of pills. What it might mean.
“Arthit,” he says.
“One of our friends has been busy,” Arthit says. He sounds thick as sludge, as befits a man who drank his weight the previous evening.
The fact that this is not about Noi sends a porous buoyancy through Rafferty and makes the day visible through the open door look less stifling. “We have friends in common?” He sucks down most of the coffee that remains in the cup.
“One of our friends in the card game. You’re famous.”
Rafferty says, “Well, don’t worry, I’ll still say hello to you. If we should happen to meet, I mean. However unlikely that may be.”
After a moment Arthit says, “How much coffee have you had?”
Rafferty looks down into the mug, which is empty. “One cup.”
“You have a very responsive system.”
“Some people are Ferraris,” Rafferty says, “and some are Land Rovers.”
“And some are in the Bangkok Sun and the World,” Arthit says. “And a couple of the Thai-language papers, too.”
“Wait. What’s in the paper?”
“You and Pan,” Arthit says. “You’re big news.”
Rafferty puts down the cup. “Let me go get the papers,” he says. “I’ll call you back.”
There he is: page three in the Sun and page seven in the World. The Sun even has a dark, fuzzy picture, cribbed from the color shot on the back of Rafferty’s book Looking for Trouble in Thailand but oddly mutated by being cheaply converted into a black-and-white halftone.
“I look like an ax murderer,” Rafferty says.
“With all due respect,” Arthit says on the other end of the phone, “how you look is the least of your problems.”
“No,” Rafferty says. “How you look is the least of my problems. How I look is a matter of some concern. Who talked to the press?”
“None of them. They don’t have this kind of clout. One of them, probably Vinai, talked to someone who does have this kind of clout.”
“Why Vinai?”
“He’s the one who brought Pan.”
“And why don’t you think he made the call himself?”
“As I said, clout. By the time the game ended, the papers were coming up on deadline. It took somebody with weight to get the stories into the morning editions. And then look at what’s not in the story. The card game, any hint of resistance on Pan’s part-practically everything is missing except the fact that a farang has been selected to write Pan’s biography, with Pan’s blessing.”
“So what does that mean?”
Arthit says, “I don’t know yet.”
Rafferty’s adopted daughter, Miaow, comes into the living room, her hair wet and pasted to her head from her morning shower, on her way to another challenging day of fourth grade. She has been detached and even sullen lately, but she’s sufficiently surprised to see Rafferty-who’s not often up at this hour-to give him a startled little wave. Then she damps down her enthusiasm and heads for the kitchen.
“My phone’s been ringing all morning,” Rafferty says to Arthit.
“Oh, sure. This is news. Bangkok ’s most profligate billionaire, the guy who gold-plated his Rolls-Royce and is known not to care for farang, has suddenly given one of them the right to tell his story.”
As if on cue, the other phone begins to ring.
“There’s my public,” Rafferty says. “Do you know somebody on the Sun, a reporter called Eloise or Eleanor or something?”
“Elora?” Arthit asks. Miaow comes into the room with a can of Coke in one hand and an orange in the other and starts toward the ringing phone. Rafferty holds up a hand to stop her.
“That’s it,” he says to Arthit. “Elora.”
“Elora Weecherat,” Arthit says. “Business section. Looks like a fashion model, but she’s as tough as nails.”
Miaow tucks the orange under her chin and picks up the phone, ignoring Rafferty’s attempt to wave her off. “Yeah?” she says.
“Is she pro or con on Pan?” Rafferty asks.
“She’s got a kind of horrified fascination,” Arthit says. “Mainly because of all the girls.”
Miaow says, “He’s on the other phone. This is his daughter.”
Hearing Miaow refer to herself as his daughter makes Rafferty smile, although he knows she won’t like his smile any more than she seems to like anything else these days. “What’s she going to think when I quit?”
“Are you going to quit?”
“No,” Miaow says, in the put-upon tone Rafferty’s been hearing a lot of. “I won’t write down a number. I’m eating breakfast. Call him back.” She hangs up and takes the orange out from under her chin, and her eyes drift to the newspapers on the table.
“I thought we’d decided that last night,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to call him today and tell him I changed my mind.”
“Just checking,” Arthit says. “I didn’t know we’d come to a firm decision.”
“All this nonsense this morning has, as the British say, stiffened my resolve. I am stiffly resolved not to do it.”
Miaow nudges Rafferty’s arm. He glances up to see her finger pointed at his photo in the Sun. He nods, and Miaow tugs down the corners of her mouth and lifts her eyebrows, looking grudgingly impressed. At least, Rafferty thinks, it’s a reaction.