Rafferty feels his face go hot.
“So you thought she was a college student or something, and you gave her-”
Rafferty tries to wave the rest of the story away. “I remember.”
“-you gave her five hundred baht. Because you were a sap. And the next night when you came in, everybody was wearing glasses.”
“Oh,” Rafferty says, the light dawning in the east. “Jah.”
“Right. She was the one whose glasses were so strong she walked off the edge of the stage and landed on that foreign woman. Anyway, Jah tested positive.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Rose is right, Jah had always been laughing.
“She’s okay.” She comes back and takes her seat again. “She got into a place here in Bangkok with about a hundred and fifty women in it. I know five or six of them. They get the drugs without having to pay for them, they have a place to sleep, they get three meals. They’re not out on the street, dying, or curled up in some shack up north, with the whole village pointing at them. Pan pays for it all.”
Rafferty says, “Last night he was calling the women on Patpong whores.”
“They are,” Rose says.
“Well, yeah, I mean, sure, literally.” This is not his most comfortable subject. “But he used the word-I don’t know-contemptuously.”
“That’s who he is. He uses the worst words he can think of. And then he goes and sets up a place like the one Jah is in.”
“I’m ready,” Miaow says, coming into the room in her school uniform. Her hair has been meticulously reparted and slicked down, and the skin on her cheeks literally shines. She is, Rafferty thinks, the cleanest child on the face of the earth.
“Let’s go, then,” he says, standing up.
“Why are you taking me?” Miaow demands. “I get there by myself every day.”
“Why not?” Rafferty says. “I’m awake, it’s time, and you’re my daughter. You said so yourself.”
Miaow slips into the straps of her backpack. “He’s weird today,” she says to Rose.
Rose says, “He’s weird every day.”
For the first five minutes of the taxi ride, Miaow gives him the brooding silence that seems to be her new default mode.
When she finally talks, he gets the topic he wants least. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“Why would something be wrong?”
“I saw you when you were talking on the phone. You got all tight and squinched.”
“Squinched?”
“That’s English,” she says. “I think.”
“I suppose it’s closer to English than it is to anything else.”
“Anyway, you looked like that.”
Rafferty gazes longingly out the window, which is too small for him to escape through. In retrospect, being alone with Miaow right now is not a tremendous idea. For some obscure reason, possibly because she knows he loves her with all his heart, she thinks she can ask him about anything. And, of course, she’s right.
He opts for selective honesty. “You know that book they mentioned in the newspaper?”
She blows out, her upper teeth against her lower lip to create a very long and slightly irritated “Ffffffffffff” sound. “I remember. It was only half an hour ago.”
“Well, that was someone who told me not to write it.”
Miaow says, “Or what?”
He should have known better. “What do you mean, ‘or what’?”
She crosses her arms high on her chest. “People don’t tell you not to do something without saying ‘or what.’ You know that.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies.”
“No. He said ‘or something,’ and then you got all squinched.”
The cab, at long last, makes the right into the street that leads to the street that leads to the street that Miaow’s school is on. Rafferty exhales heavily and says, “Jesus, this is a long ride.”
Miaow’s not giving him an inch. “That’s because you can’t think of anything to say.”
“Why have you been so grumpy lately?” Rafferty asks.
“Don’t change the subject. They said ‘or something.’”
“All right, you’re absolutely correct. They said if I wrote the book, they’d attack me with garden tools, chop me up, and make me into sandwiches.”
“I’m not five,” Miaow says. “Why would anyone make a sandwich with garden tools?”
“They’re farmers,” Rafferty improvises. “That’s all they have.”
“Why don’t they just back the buffalo over you?”
“Then they wouldn’t have the sandwiches.”
The remark gets the silence it deserves, and Miaow allows it to stretch out. Then she puts a small brown hand on top of his, the first time she’s touched him in days. “Are you going to get us into trouble?”
“Absolutely not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Very simple,” he says. “I’m not going to write the book.”
It takes only a second for his life to change.
The thrust of something hard into his back. The solid grip on his upper arm.
“It’s a gun,” a man says in English. “Stop walking. Don’t look around.”
“Or what?” Rafferty says, Miaow’s voice in his ears. The door to her school is a few yards behind him. She disappeared through it ten seconds ago.
“Or I’ll blow your spine to bits.” The English is almost completely unaccented.
“Just asking.”
“Hold still,” the man says, and something dark brown is pulled over Rafferty’s head and he’s shoved forward. “Bend down, pull the hood away from your chest, and look at your feet. There’s an open car door in front of you. Get in. Leave the door open behind you and sit in the middle. Clear?”
“Crystalline.”
“Then go.”
The car is black, and the bit of it he can see is clean and highly polished. He climbs in. It is cool and smells of leather. He slides to the center of the seat, his feet straddling the bump for the drive shaft, and waits. The front door opens, and the car dips as someone very heavy climbs in. A second later the back door to his left opens. A man gets in, and then there is another man sitting on his right. A gun probes his ribs on each side.
“With all friendly intent,” Rafferty says, “if those bullets go through me, you’re going to be shooting each other.”
“They won’t go through you,” says the man who had spoken before, who is now to Rafferty’s right. “They’re.22 hollow-points. They’ll just turn you to hamburger inside and stay there.”
Rafferty says, “Good. I’d hate to worry about you.” He hears a ticking that he identifies as the turn signal, the driver preparing to enter the stream of traffic.
“On the other hand,” the man says, “no exit wounds. You can have an open-casket funeral.”
11
The baby’s name is Peep.
The night whispered the name in Da’s ear just before she dropped off to sleep. She had spent hours, extravagantly letting her candle burn down, studying the child’s face. He is a beautiful baby with features of bewildering delicacy, especially the impossible miniature perfection of the nose and ears, the long, dark fringe of eyelashes, the soft curls of black hair. All of it so defenseless, all of it so new.
“Peep” is the first sound a chick makes, when its wings are silly, useless elbows and its feathers are yellow baby fluff. It’s a small sound, breath-edged, perfect for a baby.
So: Peep.
Don’t drop it, the man in the office had said.
How could she drop him?
Early the next morning, they were jostled down the stairs and across the drying mud into the back of a pair of vans. The men and the cripples were herded into one van, the women with children into the other.
The windows were covered with ragged pieces of sacking that had been glued to the glass. The covered windows frightened Da: Why shouldn’t they see where they were going? She pointed to the cloth and made a palms-up, questioning gesture to the deaf and dumb woman, who smiled and shook her head: Don’t worry. One of the other women, older than the others, with a skeletal, stunned-looking four- or five-year-old child clinging to her, said, “It’s so nobody can see in. People aren’t supposed to know that we get driven back and forth.”