After what feels like an eternity, someone in the vehicle laughs, and it pulls slowly away from the curb.
The license plate is not Thai. It has only five digits. Rafferty doesn’t even need to write them down.
“THIS IS ELORA.” The voice is brisk and cool. Rafferty has an image of a slender vamp from the 1940s, wearing seamed stockings and a dress with shoulder pads, her hair loosely rolled up around her head. A sort of executive big-band singer.
“Ms. Weecherat. This is Poke Rafferty.” This is his third cab in twenty minutes, and no one seems to be following it. His body still feels loose and nerveless, emptied by the draining of all that adrenaline.
“You were going to call me back.”
“And here I am.”
“This morning. While you were news.” The words are in precise English, with a faint accent that could be French.
“I’m still news.”
“That’s what everybody thinks.” Definitely French. “But it’s not true unless you have something new.”
“Do I ever.”
A moment’s evaluative pause. “If you want to talk to me, I’ll need to meet you,” she says.
“That could be difficult.”
“Call me again when it’s not.”
“Wait. You want what I have.”
“Because.”
“Because it’s sensational.”
“Then I definitely need to meet you.”
Rafferty says, “Someplace we won’t be seen.”
“Where are you?”
“New Petchburi Road.” It’s not true, but it’s not far off.
“How’s traffic?”
“I’m in Bangkok,” Rafferty says. “How would it be?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Toward Silom. Okay, I know where. Write this down.” He gives her an address on Silom and then a suite number. “That’s my dentist. I know her well enough for this.”
“A dentist? This had better be worth it.”
“Can you make the deadline for tomorrow’s paper?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’ll be worth it.”
He has been in the fourth cab only a minute when his phone rings.
“What the hell are you doing?” It is the man who sat next to him in the Lincoln.
“I’ve been thinking about buying a cab. Thought I’d try a few out.”
“Where are you?”
“ Rama IV Road,” Rafferty lies. “You mean your guys lost me?”
“Yes,” the man says. “But we know exactly where everyone else is.”
“When this is over,” Rafferty says, “I’m going to pull your teeth one by one and shove them up your nose.”
“No point getting mad at me. Just don’t disappear again, or there will be consequences.”
“What was that cute thing with the SUV?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you want this book or not?”
“He wants it.”
Rafferty says, “And he’ll be unhappy if things go wrong.”
“Things won’t go wrong.”
“They will if you ever pull anything like that again,” Rafferty says, and disconnects. Then he sags back against the seat and works on his breathing.
16
The day is endless.
The river of people continues to flow past her, sometimes in full flood, sometimes at a trickle. Occasionally the people arrive in knots and tangles, as though they were snarled in the branches of a floating tree. People are most likely to give when the river is trickling. They can see her from farther away then; they have time to make up their minds, to fish out the money so they can drop it into the bowl without slowing. No one wants to slow. Most look no further than the upraised bowl, as though it were floating unaided above the sidewalk. A few glance at her very quickly and then look away, embarrassed.
The tree-trunk man in the blue shirt is always somewhere nearby. Every time someone drops paper money into her bowl, he is there, snatching it.
Da has begun to keep a count in her head, just as something to do. When she was small, she discovered she was good with numbers. She did the math, mostly subtraction, that spelled out her family’s finances. She is surprised by the amount of money that has fallen into the bowl. Counting Helen’s 1,500 baht, it comes to 3,200, plus the coins that she hasn’t counted yet. So say 3,500 baht.
The man in the office said they took 40 percent. That means she keeps 60 percent. To do the math, she divides by ten-let’s say that’s 350 baht-and then multiplies by six.
More than 2,000 baht.
There were twenty or twenty-five beggars in that building. If all of them take in as much as she, the man in the office is making something like 28,000 baht a day. There are probably other beggars in other buildings. He is probably making…she works out the answers, but she has to stop and double-check the zeros in her head. He is probably making more than a million baht a month.
Da’s father earned less than 13,000 baht a year.
Still, she thinks, they have people to pay. Money to the police not to chase the beggars away. There are businesses behind her, their front doors opening onto the sidewalk. The business owners probably get paid something, too.
Someone drops a coin into her bowl, and she looks up to see a little boy of nine or ten, scurrying away as though he’s done something he’s ashamed of. He is the first child she has seen since morning. That means school is out. It’s after two-thirty, perhaps three. At four o’clock it will be over.
They have to pay the drivers, she thinks, the man in the blue shirt. Maybe rent for the half-finished building they sleep in. The vans, the gasoline. Expenses.
Still, it’s a lot of money. It’s the most money she’s even thought about in her life. She sees again the shoes the man in the office had worn, shoes that looked as if their soles had never left a carpet.
Maybe he has a hundred beggars. Maybe two hundred.
Peep makes the rising sound that means he wants her to look at him. She drops her eyes to her lap, and sure enough he is gazing at her, the gaze that makes her feel he can see right through her. She feels the smile spread over her face, and then a thought chases it away.
Did they have to pay for him?
How much do you pay for a baby? Do they all cost the same? Are they priced by the pound, like meat? Do beautiful ones cost more than ugly ones? Is there an extra charge for light skin, like Peep’s, or a discount for dark babies? Do children of different ages cost different amounts?
Different ages.
The oldest undamaged child she has seen is the skeletal boy of four or five. Where are the older children?
“How are you doing?”
It’s a woman’s voice, and there he is, the skeletal boy, and behind him is the woman from the van. The child looks at nothing, clutching the woman’s sleeve in a hand that’s all knuckles.
“Can we go now?” Da asks.
“Another hour. Kep has gone to eat something. He does this every day. We’ve got half an hour before he gets back.” The woman shakes her sleeve free, but the child immediately reclaims it, without even glancing at it. His dusky skin is stretched tightly over his bones and his eyes have the unblinking luster Da associates with the simple-minded.
“Kep?”
“The one in the blue shirt.” The woman puts her folded blanket on the pavement and sits on it. The boy immediately sits beside her. He puts an open hand, dark and elongated as a monkey’s paw, on her leg, palm up. “How much money has Kep taken from you today?”
“More than three thousand baht.”
The other woman raises her eyebrows. “Good day.”
“One woman gave me fifteen hundred.”
“The farang with the metal hair?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky you. She comes every day. She works somewhere down there. One of the buildings.”