“You was friend with Arnold, yes?” The voice is liquid and heavy and saturated with melancholy; it sort of rolls around like mercury. The accent is Boris-and-Natasha Russian, but, like the face, deeply not comic.
“I was, yes.” It seems natural to echo the question’s structure.
“And Arnold.” The hand on Rafferty’s shoulder tightens, and the squeezed-together eyes get closer to him. “Arnold is now with the fishes?”
Rafferty shakes his head, not understanding. “I’m sorry-”
“Sleeps,” the man says, turning it into “slips.” “Arnold, he slips with the fishes?”
“Not unless they buried him at sea,” Rafferty says. “Last time I saw him, he was dry.”
“But not …” the Russian hesitates. “Not feeling good.”
“Not feeling much of anything.”
The eyes come even closer, and Rafferty smells a great many onions. “You killed him?”
“No,” Rafferty says. “Not directly, at least.”
“Hah,” the man says. It sounds to Rafferty like he’s indicating that he’d laugh if someone would only teach him how. The bartender pours half of the beer into a smeared glass and slaps both bottle and glass down on the bar. The noise makes Poke jump. The Russian straightens up and says “Hah” again.
“So,” Rafferty says, hoisting the glass, “you knew Arnold.”
“Long time, wery long time. Arnold and me …” He holds up his index and middle finger, close together, side by side. “Like this, you know?”
“I guess.” This isn’t the most comfortable news.
The man shakes his head fondly. “I try to kill him many, many time. Once I make honey trap-You know honey trap?”
“With a woman, right?”
“And such a woman.” The man claps Rafferty on the shoulder again, and beer slops onto the bar. “Such a woman usually I kip for myself. But Arnold is problem. Arnold always is problem. So I make under bed, Semtex. Bed wery old, bend down when somebody sit on it, make two piece metal come together.” His hands, palm to palm, are a couple of inches apart. “Make circuit, yes? Booooom.” His hands come together and fly apart. They’re enormous.
“Boom,” Rafferty says, mainly to show he’s listening.
“Arnold, always he come elewen o’clock morning.” A tap on the crystal of his steel wristwatch. “I put Semtex nine o’clock, when woman is go eat. But she like money too much, bring cook back from restaurant to make jiggy-jig fast before Arnold come. Cook wery fat, sit down … Poh!”
“ ‘Poh’?” Rafferty says.
“Hah,” the man says a third time, with something regretful in it. “Woman wery angry. Get cook-” He mimes brushing pieces of the cook off his sleeves. Then he picks up the bottle in front of Poke, which is still half full, knocks most of it back, does a basso profundo burp, and says, “You come.” He turns away. Rafferty drops some bills on the bar and follows.
They pass four of the five booths. In each, three or four men, their faces pasteurized by the gloom, glance up at him with the impatient air of people whose conversation has been interrupted. To the men in the third booth, the Russian says, “You right, Arnold is dead.”
One of the men in the booth raises his glass in a toast and says, “Good.”
Two men wait in the final booth, the one to which the Russian leads him. Rafferty’s eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and as he sits, he sees that one of them affects the ever-stylish Dr. Evil look, with a shaved head, a mustache, a goatee, and a single earring above a pale garment that might be the grandchild of a Mao jacket, while the other is simply part of the scenery, a man with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. A written description would read, “Medium everything.” Like the man with the cleft chin, these two appear to be in their sixties or early seventies, but preserved in something potent and perhaps poisonous. Rafferty slides in beside Dr. Evil as the man with the Russian accent says, “You buy, yes?” and shouts something to the bartender without waiting for an answer.
“Vladimir,” the man says, pointing at himself as he sits. “Pierre,” he says, indicating Dr. Evil. “And, um …”
“Janos,” says the man without any characteristics.
“Always I forget,” Vladimir says. “This is why you genius.”
Janos nods modestly, and everyone waits, looking at Poke.
“Ummm, Poke,” Poke says.
“So this one,” Vladimir says, tilting his head at Poke, “who says name is Ummm Poke, he was friend with Arnold. Arnold now he slip with the fishes, but friend who says name is Ummm Poke is here. Friend want something, yes?”
“Yes,” Poke says. “And my name really is-”
“Poke,” Vladimir says with the weary air of someone who knows much, much better. The bartender appears with a tray on which he has crowded a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and three glasses, plus another megabottle of Singha, apparently to replace the one Vladimir drank. He slams the whole thing on the table, prompting a startled hiss from the next booth, and shimmers off into the gloom.
“I’ve got a description of someone,” Rafferty says when everyone’s glasses are full. “Someone about your age. I need to know whether any of you recognize him and, if you do, who he is.”
“This is big job,” Vladimir says automatically. “You have money?”
“Sure.” Rafferty pulls all the bills from his front pocket and counts them out, with every eye in the booth following his hands. “Eleven thousand three hundred baht,” he says. He pushes it into the center of the table and then cups his hands over it and waits.
“We need contract,” Vladimir says. “Werbal contract. Ewerybody listen, ewerybody talk. Anybody know anything, we split up even, okay?”
“No,” says Janos. “Whoever knows most gets half.”
“We can do without you,” Vladimir says. “Plenty other guys in here.”
“Okay, even,” Janos says.
Vladimir says, “Good.” He mimes a handshake with each of them without reaching out very far, then takes a hundred-baht note and hands it to Poke. “For taxi,” he says, turning it into “texi.” “But why you think we maybe know him?”
“He’s in your business, he’s your generation, and his taste in clothes says he’s been in the region for a long time.”
Dr. Evil says, in a dry, wispy voice that reminds Rafferty of the dry rustle a T-shirt makes when he pulls it over his head, “Reason is always refreshing.”
“He’s American,” Rafferty says, pocketing the hundred baht. “Maybe sixty-five now, short and thick, with a big gut. Red hair going gray, bright red face.”
“You talking before about his clothes,” Vladimir says.
“Right. Dresses awful. Jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Wrinkled. Like a tourist who’s spent ten years in a suitcase.”
All the spies look at all the other spies. All that’s needed for atmosphere, Rafferty thinks, is a ticking clock. The silence stretches out as he tilts his glass back and lowers the beer’s level. Dr. Evil starts to open his mouth, but Vladimir shakes his head a quarter of an inch, one time. They look at each other some more.
“What else?” Vladimir says.
“Hair coming out of his nose. If he was Rapunzel, he could lower his nose hair to let the prince climb up.”
Vladimir nods sadly and says, “More money.”
“Where’s the nearest ATM?”
“Around the corner,” says Dr. Evil in his frayed voice. “I’ll go with you.”
Vladimir says immediately, “We all go.”
“Nobody goes,” Rafferty says. “First you tell me a little more, and if I decide I want you to keep talking, I’ll go get the money.”
Vladimir says, “You no trust us.”
“Sure I do. I just don’t want to have to get up if it’s not necessary.”
Vladimir nods at Dr. Evil, and Dr. Evil says, “Maybe Murphy.”