The sergeant puts up both hands, palms out. “No, no. But thank you.”
“Four days,” she says. “He said he’d be back in four days. Said they’d all be back in four days.” She brushes her hands together and pushes off from the wall again, stumbling toward the sergeant, who backs against the door. “Whoops,” she says. “Well, bye-bye. I live right there,” she adds, pointing. “Where that open door is.”
Rafferty ducks into the kitchen as she swings the door closed. She goes straight to the mirror in the living room and begins to smooth her hair back, clucking at the state of her makeup. Her eyes find his in the mirror, and she begins to laugh.
Forty minutes later the cops are long gone, and Rafferty comes out of the elevator in the underground garage to find a silver Toyota waiting. The car’s rear door is already open, so he’s visible for just a couple of seconds. When he’s lying on the floor in the back, Mrs. Pongsiri climbs in and rests her high heels on his ribs.
“Careful with that,” he says.
“You not hide behind woman,” she says as the car jerks into motion, “but hide under woman, no problem.”
The driver laughs along with her.
7
Power in the dark.
Rafferty has always been fascinated by enormous power-power on an imperial scale-exercised in secret. He’s spent much of his adult life traveling among the powerless, among people who generally are who they say they are and do what they say they’ll do. People who have little and seem unwilling to become someone else in order to have more. In the past decade, this kind of behavior has become regarded by many as naive and even quaint, behavior that identifies people who haven’t figured out the new rules.
Power in the dark seems to Rafferty to be the defining form of evil in the twenty-first century. It’s evolved from an occasional governmental tactic into business as usual, as the world’s rulers find goals in common-usually economic goals that benefit the rich and strengthen the rulers’ hold on power-and pursue them jointly, turning out the lights on the contradictions between what they say and what they do.
Rafferty can remember, hazily, a time in which getting caught in a lie was a career-threatening crisis for a politician, at least in the countries that retain pretensions of democracy. Now there’s a whole thesaurus of euphemisms for lying, and it’s opened daily.
It’s the age of equivocation, the age of the press secretary, the age of entire ministries of spin, the age of collusion and obfuscation, the age when the future is on teleprompter and the script is kept in a vault. Anytime politicians talk about “transparency,” Rafferty thinks, voters need to reach for the X-ray glasses. Whatever compact of honesty was presumed in the past to exist between the rulers and the ruled is fast dwindling in the rearview mirror.
His own country is as bad as any of them and worse than some. Secret enterprise, stringently denied, is the order of the day. Which has created a boom market for people who are skilled at working in the dark.
What it really is, it seems to him, is the Age of the Spook.
When, he thinks, the day’s agenda seems to have been carved into black stone in a dark room, when you feel as helpless as a penny on a railroad track, and when you glimpse spooks in your peripheral vision, it’s time to go talk to some spooks.
It’s probably not actually called the No-Name Bar, but no name is visible from the sleepy soi outside. Just a stretch of stucco the color of cream with dirt stirred into it and a pair of the smoked-glass doors that are ubiquitous among Bangkok’s shadier business establishments. The soi itself is almost as featureless as the stucco walclass="underline" a thin seam of asphalt too narrow for two cars, framed by a sidewalk of tilting, badly set paving stones that are interrupted every now and then by one of those peculiarly Bangkok trees, wizened, largely leaf-free little spindles that look like they’d be more comfortable bent over a walker. Trees that look like they’ve got a cough.
The bar is just as he remembers it, which is to say it’s more cramped than it appears from outside and as dark as a bat’s theme park. He has the brief sensation that nothing at all has changed since he was last here, that the people inside have been frozen in place until he breaks the spell by opening the door.
It’s a long, narrow room that gives the impression that all the right angles are subtly off. The front doors open directly onto the bar, which looks solid enough to repel a blast from a shotgun. The bar is U-shaped and protrudes into the center of the room like a stuck-out tongue, with two wary-looking bartenders in the center. The patrons all sit on the far side of the bar, facing the door. The rest of the room is occupied by a series of booths along the right wall, the dividers between them projecting out so far that the walkway that leads past them isn’t much wider than a single heavyset man. A tiny transparent lightbulb, perhaps twenty watts, hangs like a distant, dying star over each booth.
The booths’ occupants are shielded from view by the booth dividers, which are unusually high, about the height of the wall around a toilet cubicle in a public restroom. Rafferty sees only five people at the bar, three sitting on stools spaced well apart and the two working behind it, but there could be twenty more people in the place, enjoying their nice covert drinks as they hatch conspiracies or practice character assassination in smaller groups. He has a feeling the only reason the noise level doesn’t drop when he walks in is that there isn’t a noise level. If people are talking, they’re talking in whispers.
Everyone he can see is looking at him.
The no-name is one of two spook bars to which Rafferty was brought by Arnold Prettyman, the putatively retired CIA man who was killed when he turned over the wrong rock while he was working on Rafferty’s behalf. Rafferty has no idea whether his accidental role in Prettyman’s death is known in this bar, but it very well may be. Information is the currency in the room. This is where the cloak-and-dagger friends and enemies of Arnold’s shadowy youth and middle age gather to refight the old battles, from back in the 1960s and ’70s, when they were outplotting and shooting at each other. The thawing of the Cold War and the shift of the global stress lines from Southeast Asia to the Middle East stranded a lot of spooks in the jungles where they’d been stationed, and a remarkable number of them rolled downhill to Bangkok.
And now they congregate day after day, night after night, in the no-name bar. It’s a deadlier version, Rafferty thinks, of the Expat Bar, but just as sad.
One bartender looks at a customer, gets a minuscule nod, and comes to take Rafferty’s order while the other bartender heads for one of the hidden booths. The three customers have swiveled their stools to turn their backs, but Rafferty can feel their eyes in the mirror on the opposing wall.
The bartender lifts his chin in a silent query, as though the sound of his voice is classified, and Rafferty orders yet another Singha beer, one of the big ones. The bartender makes no move to get the drink until Rafferty sees, in the mirror, a hand extend into the narrow aisle beside the booths and make the okay sign. The bartender examines Rafferty again as though he’s checking for a hidden weapon or an ulterior motive and then slides open the cooler behind the bar. Rafferty is watching the man’s movements when something heavy lands on his shoulder. A hand with a plenteous crop of black hair.
When he looks up, he sees a darkly shadowed chin, divided by a cleft that looks like it was incised with a hatchet. The chin and jaw are the widest parts of the head, which narrows as it rises toward a curly fringe of black hair, parted in the center and brushed over the forehead in very peculiar bangs. The upper lip is so long that Rafferty wonders whether the man can smell his food. Beneath a single solid hedge of eyebrow, a pair of tiny black eyes crowd as close together as a flounder’s. The overall effect should be silly, but it’s light-years from silly.