“Da and Peep,” Helen says. “Peep and Da.”
“Happy,” Da says, and then runs the sentence through her mind once and says, “Happy meet you.”
“Oh, well, honey,” Helen says, blinking fast, “I’m happy to meet you, too. And I’ll be back here tomorrow. I’ll be back here every day this week, and I’ll be looking for you.” She tugs her blouse straight, puts the strap of the big straw purse over her shoulder. She waves at Peep. “You take care of that little treasure,” she says. “Bye, now.”
Da says, “Bye-bye,” and Helen is gone.
And immediately the space is filled by the tree-trunk man in the blue shirt, who snatches the five-hundred-baht bills out of the bowl, bends down, and says furiously, “Never do that. Never. Never give money back. Do you understand me?”
Da lowers her head. Peep begins to cry again. “I understand,” Da says.
“You’re here to get it, not give it away.” And then the man is gone.
Da sits there, bouncing Peep to quiet his crying, trying to reassemble the feeling she had before Helen bumped into her. But what she feels instead is the warmth of that fixed gaze.
When she turns this time, she sees him: a spectrally slender boy of thirteen or fourteen, with a sharp-featured face and long, knotted hair. A moment later, like an animal disappearing into the brush around her village, he is gone.
12
You guys do this often?” Rafferty asks.
“Often enough,” says the man on his right, the one who spoke before.
“The driver must be built like a sumo wrestler. When he got in, it felt like the car was going to tip over.”
“You hear that?” the man asks in Thai. “A sumo wrestler.”
The man in front makes a sound that Rafferty identifies as a chuckle. Despite having read countless novels in which characters chuckle more or less continuously, this is the first time Rafferty has actually heard someone do it.
Rafferty says, “He chuckled.”
“He’s a merry soul,” says the man to his right.
“It’s important to be happy in one’s work,” Rafferty says.
“Do you always chatter like this when you’re frightened?”
Rafferty says, “I’d be frightened if you hadn’t put the hood on.”
“That just means we’re not going to kill you. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to beat the shit out of you.”
“When I’m frightened, I shut up,” Rafferty says.
After a moment of silence, the man to his right chuckles.
“You chuckled, too,” Rafferty says. “Did somebody teach all you guys to chuckle?”
“The chuckle,” the man to his right says, “is a perfectly acceptable form of laughter.”
“You speak very good English.”
They ride in silence for a few moments. Then the man says, “Here’s the problem: It doesn’t matter whether I like you. I’ll do anything to you that I’m told to do. Kill you without a thought. So go ahead and entertain us, but it won’t make any difference.”
Rafferty says, “Why waste good material?”
Down a ramp and over some speed bumps. The car stops, and a hand grasps Rafferty’s arm.
“Let’s go. And don’t suddenly get stupid.”
“I don’t suddenly get stupid,” Rafferty says, sliding across the leather. “I have to work up to it.”
A few short steps, a wait, and then a bell rings. Rafferty hears the doors slide open, and he’s guided in. The man says, “Use the key for express. No stops.” Rafferty counts his pulse as the elevator rises, not because he thinks it’ll be useful but because it seems to be the only information available. At the count of seventy-three, the elevator does a stomach-churning deceleration, and at seventy-seven it comes to a full stop. An amplified woman’s voice with a fruity, phony-upper-class British intonation, says, “Thirty-six.” Then she repeats it in Thai.
“Shit,” says the man who has been doing all the talking. “I forgot about that.”
Rafferty says, “I didn’t hear it in either language.”
“No, you didn’t. And you don’t mention it while you’re talking to the man, understand? If you want to get through the day alive, you’ll forget all about it.”
“It’s gone.”
“Good.” Hands take his elbows as the doors slide open and a wave of cold air rolls at them. “You’re going straight now. I’ll tell you when we’ve got to turn.”
Four turns later he is stopped. He hears a very faint tapping sound that could be fingers on a keyboard. Several keyboards. A secretarial pool? It’s easy to envision one of those big open rooms with chest-high walls. A secretarial pool, in the kind of office where a hooded man doesn’t invite speculation.
So an office suite. On the thirty-sixth floor of some building, almost certainly in the Sathorn district.
A door squeaks open to his right, and hands grasp his shoulders and turn him ninety degrees to point him toward it.
“Walk four or five steps directly forward and then stop. When you hear the door close, take the hood off.”
Rafferty counts off five steps, feeling thick carpet underfoot. The door closes with the same squeak. He removes the hood.
He is in a conference room. A single glance makes it clear that what is conferred about here is money, gobs and gobs of money. The table, at least sixteen feet long, is teak. It doesn’t look like a veneer. It looks like twelve hundred pounds of extremely valuable, endangered hardwood. Surrounding it are eight high-backed teak chairs with sky blue woven-silk cushions, the precise color of the carpet. Dead center in front of one chair is a bright yellow legal pad and a single ballpoint pen.
Other than the pad and pen, the surface of the table gleams empty except for a squat black high-tech object at one end, an obviously expensive Whole Geek Catalog item that looks to Rafferty like it might spring a set of pincers and decide to crawl across the table toward him. The walls, covered in a cream-colored fabric, host large rectangular pale patches, announcing where pictures or posters were probably removed for his visit. Near the top of the wall to his right are two small square windows: a projection booth.
Rafferty takes a couple of steps, and a tinny voice says, “Sit.” The voice comes from the techno-thing on the table, which Rafferty belatedly recognizes as a conference-call terminal. He glances up at the windows of the projection booth, but the glass is dark. Whoever is watching him is sitting well back in the gloom.
“Here, I assume.” Rafferty pulls out the chair in front of the legal pad and sits. “Listen,” he says. “I appreciate you sending the car and everything, but if this is about the book, you should know that I’m not going to-”
“Of course it’s about the book,” the man says. “I want it written immediately.”
Rafferty parrots, “You want it written.” He feels like a man who’s just been shown proof that two plus two is a subtraction problem.
“Beginning today. You’ll be paid a substantial advance, which will be transferred into your account at Thai Fisherman’s Bank, the Silom branch, in ninety minutes. It’s account 044-35-11966, is it not?”
“I’ll take your word.”
“Look under the legal pad.”
Rafferty says, “No.”
A pause, just long enough for Rafferty to swallow.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not going to write the book.”
“You’re mistaken. You’re not only going to write it, you’re going to file regular reports on your progress. You’re going to share the chapters with us as you finish them. We’ll have suggestions. You will accept them.”
“It’s not going to get that far. I’m not going to write it. So, with that out of the way, you can go back to standing behind the screen and working the levers or whatever it is you do with your time.” He starts to get up.
“If you go through that door before I excuse you, you’ll have a very brief time to regret it.”
Rafferty analyzes the sentence for a moment and lowers himself back into the chair.