Rafferty says, “Pretty much everyone is.” He starts to climb up the bank but turns back and says, “Get rid of those phones.”
45
They don’t know where he is,” Captain Teeth says, putting down the phone and following Ton with his eyes. “He’s out with the wife somewhere.”
Ton is agitated in a way that unnerves Ren. The man paces the room, running his fingertips over the surfaces of the furniture as though expecting dust. He straightens everything he touches: photos, pens, ashtrays, knickknacks, but he never looks down at the result. He continually tugs at the sleeves of his jacket, as though they’re riding up on him. He buttons and unbuttons his sport coat. He hasn’t sat down in the twenty minutes since he burst into the room, swearing about Pan.
“Call back whoever you talked to,” Ton says. “Tell him if he can’t find his boss and put me in touch with him in half an hour, it’ll be years before he gets another job. I need the woman’s phone located, and that man’s boss is the only one who can authorize it.”
“Fine,” Captain Teeth says, dialing. He turns his back to Ton and, looking at Ren, rolls his eyes.
“Pan’s going to make an announcement,” Ton says. “He’s going…to make…an announcement. After everything we’ve learned from this…this fishing expedition with Rafferty, he’s going to make an announcement? You,” he says to Ren, “get on the phone and-” He is still for the first time since he came through the door. “No,” he says. “Forget it. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Ton goes through the door and into a long, dim hallway, paneled in reflective mahogany. The only lights gleam above paintings: a darkly polished Vuillard, two gauzy Renoirs, a pallid, drooping Madonna by the Dutch Vermeer forger of the 1930s, Han van Meegeren. Three doors down, he pushes his way into a room that’s empty except for some bare bookshelves, a grand piano, and a cello, leaning carelessly against a chair. On one of the bookshelves near the door is a telephone.
Ton picks it up, dials a number from memory, and says, “General? I’m sorry to bother you, but I think we should talk.” He listens for a second. “No, sir, I don’t think it’s anything fatal. But if you could give me a few minutes-Fine. I’ll wait for your call.” He hangs up and blots the bead of perspiration that’s gliding down toward his jawline.
THE NURSE’S CREPE-SOLED shoes squeak on the linoleum as she hurries after them. “Please, please,” she says. It’s an urgent whisper. “You can’t go in there. He’s not allowed to have visitors right now.”
Kosit speaks in his normal tone of voice, without looking back. “Did you see my uniform when we passed you?”
“Of course,” she hisses. “But still, the doctor says-”
“Tell the doctor to say it to me,” Kosit says. He pushes open the door to the patient’s room. “Now go away. We’re not going to interfere with your curing him.”
The nurse says, “There’s no curing him.”
“Then what are you worried about?” Kosit stands aside and lets Rafferty and Arthit precede him. Then he follows and closes the door in the nurse’s face. He turns his back to it and leans against it, his arms crossed.
The room is as dim and airless as a sealed cave. The flame on a candle, Rafferty thinks, would burn straight up, without a flicker. Porthip has been assigned to a high floor, with a view of Bangkok in all its sloppy, energetic life, a decision that seems to Rafferty to be tactless. Through the gauze-curtained window, arteries of light mark the progress of traffic down Sukhumvit, and neon smears the darkness with the vibrant colors of the city’s nightlife. By contrast, the single light hanging above the bed is a chalky bluish white, turning the face above the tugged-up covers into a pallid waxwork.
Porthip is flat on his back. His eyes are closed. The fat around his eyes has been burned away, and the eyeballs beneath the lids seem unusually large, as spherical as marbles. Suspended halfway down the intravenous drip that snakes under the covers to attach to the man’s wrist is a morphine-delivery unit with a plunger the patient can use when the pain is too much to bear. Beside the bed, green screens monitor the struggles of the heart that gave out yesterday, abandoning the depleted body to the cancer that is devouring it. As he approaches the bed, Rafferty studies the face. Stripped of the energy that had animated it, it seems a frail mask, bones hollowed out to create a thin shell over emptiness. Rafferty feels a cold prickling between his shoulder blades, seeing his own face in forty or fifty years.
Porthip’s eyelids flicker.
Rafferty says, “You’re awake.”
The eyes open, focused somewhere beyond Rafferty. With evident effort, Porthip brings them to Rafferty’s face. His forehead creases for a second and then clears. “You,” he says. “I wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“How long,” Porthip says. “Before you…” He lifts his chin, indicating the morphine drip. “Push that thing, would you?”
“Sure.” Rafferty depresses the plunger, and a moment later Porthip’s eyes slowly close and then reopen.
“Nothing,” he says. His voice is a husk, just a rough surface wrapped around breath. “I’ve pushed it too often. The limiter’s kicked in. But when it works, it’s great stuff. I’ve…seen things. On the walls. On the insides of my eyelids.” His back arches as a spasm runs through him. His eyes close. “Death,” he says.
Rafferty says, “So what?”
“Ah,” Porthip says, opening his eyes. “You’re angry.”
“You lied to me.”
Porthip says, “Why should you be different?”
“You’re dying. Why waste the effort now? What possible difference could it make to you at this point?”
“Habits,” Porthip says. “Hard to break.”
“Snakeskin,” Rafferty says. “It owned the factory that burned down. And you owned Snakeskin. With Tatsuya.”
“Tatsuya,” Porthip says, and this time he does smile. “The partner every businessman dreams of. Dead for years and years. Tatsuya is a signature machine back in Tokyo.”
“I don’t care about Tatsuya. You owned that factory.”
“Not according to the records,” Porthip says.
“No, of course not. But if you didn’t own it when it burned, then you did something that doesn’t make any business sense at all. You, as Snakeskin, bought a destroyed factory, paid good money for it, and then just let it sit there. You didn’t clean it up, you didn’t put it to use. It could be making money again. So why buy it if you weren’t going to do any of that?”
“Interesting question,” Porthip says.
“I don’t think you did buy it. I think you already owned it. You just quietly sold it to yourself, passed it from one company to another. You couldn’t sell it to someone else because it might have attracted media attention. The papers would have been interested. A lot of people died there.”
“One hundred,” Porthip says, and takes a breath. “And twenty-one.”
“And around the time of the fire, Pan disappears, and when he comes back, he’s got burns all over him and there’s suddenly some serious weight behind him. He’s doing big-boy business, the kind of business that requires someone to open doors. Someone like you.”
“You know,” Porthip says, “you can push the plunger on that thing up there until your thumb falls off, but it only delivers so much. They let you control your pain, but only up to a point. There’s a limiter that won’t let you go all the way to where I want to go. For that you need a doctor who’s so high up nobody would ever question him.”
“You owned that factory,” Rafferty says. “Pan got burned there, somehow, and you wound up owing him. And you’re high enough up that no one would, as you say, question you.”