“How cloak-and-dagger.”
“I’ll tell you all about it when I can.”
“Give me an hour,” Mrs. Shin says.
“When you need something done,” Rafferty says, “Call a Korean.”
His next call is to one of the first friends he made in Bangkok, Dr. Ratt. Dr. Ratt, whose name is a shorter, modernized version of one with ancient royal connections, has founded a small empire by putting uniformed doctors and nurses into automobiles and keeping five or six cars on the move at all times, thereby defeating Bangkok’s epic traffic by ensuring that medical help is usually in the neighborhood. They’re good enough friends that Dr. Ratt listens without questions, although he must have dozens. Half an hour later, six blocks from his hotel and still waiting for Arthit’s call, Rafferty climbs into the backseat of a Toyota Corolla with a doctor and a nurse, in full official regalia, sitting in front. They nod hello but ask him no questions.
After a stop to put three stitches in a patient, they drop him two corners from Mrs. Shin’s apartment and circle the block while he cuts across a couple of sois to get to the building, where he reaches into the bushes and comes out with a brown paper bag. Then they return him to the place where they picked him up. He hikes back to the hotel, calls Dr. Ratt, and arranges to be picked up by another team at 7:00 A.M.
The safest place to be, he figures, is nowhere, and what could be more nowhere than the backseat of a car rolling through Bangkok at random?
Just another dark-skinned guy idling along in the back of a car. While he figures out how to live through all this. Whatever this is.
Part Two
10
For five endless days, Rafferty sees the world through the wet windows of a succession of heavily air-conditioned Toyota Corollas, saying good-bye to each weary doctor-nurse team as they clamber out after an eight-hour shift and hello to the bright, fresh ones getting in. Dr. Ratt once told him that the doctors who drive his cars have all had what he described as “a little trouble” in their careers, or else they’d be working in some nice clean hospital that doesn’t go anywhere instead of driving around Bangkok all day. If they get fired from this job, they’ll be pulling the graveyard shift in some twenty-four-hour VD clinic. And they’ve apparently been told that any loose lips about having Rafferty in the car will get them fired. There’s a conspicuous lack of curiosity.
He gets up before it’s light outside and spreads Mrs. Shin’s dark gel over his face and ears and the back of his neck. Last, he does the backs of his hands. He learns accidentally that if the tiny cake of soap supplied by his fifth-rate hotels sits in a little water overnight, it produces a gelatinous mass that he can spread on his comb. Applied to damp hair, it makes it even darker and holds it in place for hours. Dark-skinned, black-haired, center-parted, he walks the four or five blocks to the pickup point and gets into the first of the day’s cars. He’s passed from one team to another until the shift that ends at midnight drops him a few blocks away from the designated depressive fleabag of the evening. The routine has a deadening sameness to it, but still each day has some event to distinguish it.
On day one, Arthit redefines good fortune.
“You’re in luck,” Arthit says on Anand’s cell phone. “The only decent picture they have is the one from your book.”
“Looking for Trouble in Thailand?”
“That’s the one.”
“Why am I in luck? That’s a pretty good picture.”
“Every copy in Bangkok is apparently a bootleg from a photocopy. The contrast is so high that you could be anybody.”
“They’re not using the picture of me with Campbell, or whatever his name is, the one from the video? I guess they still don’t want anyone to see his face.”
“You’re in three-quarters in the video,” Arthit says. “Authority figures like full-face.”
“And I’m not officially a suspect?”
“Not officially, no. But it’s kind of hard not to connect the dots. The bullets the coroner pulled out of Mr. Campbell were supposedly fired by your gun, and the police want to talk to you. It doesn’t sound like they want to name you Farang of the Year.”
“What do they think they’ll get out of this? Why would they take my gun and fire a couple of shots into a dead man?”
“I can think of two things,” Arthit says. “First, they’ve got you hog-tied if they catch you and demand to know what the dead man said. Tell the truth, the line will be, and they’ll make it all go away. Stonewall and you’re in prison for the rest of your life, which probably actually means dead, since they won’t want you talking to anyone else. So that’s one thing: to force you to level with them.”
“I did level with them.”
“Yeah, well. Then there’s the other reason. The country had problems, both political and religious, even before the flooding started. It’s possible the government won’t be allowed to serve its full term. It could get yanked if Bangkok floods badly, although this group had nothing to do with decades of bad or nonexistent flood planning. But even if we don’t get wet, there’s the situation in the south. We’ve got disorganized jihad going on down there, or maybe it’s organized jihad and we’re just clueless about it. And now a foreigner has been murdered, on the fringes of a demonstration over the violence down there. For the image of the country, not to mention the need to protect their own asses, Shen’s guys need to solve that crime, even if one of them committed it himself. You’re one way to solve it, and a way with no political or religious implications, since you’re farang.”
“Yup,” Rafferty says. “I guess you could say I’m in luck.” It’s not time yet for him to meet the car, so he’s gazing through the window of his hotel room, which looks onto a narrow, filthy alley much favored by rats. Sure enough, he sees a big one strolling right down the middle, ignoring the rain, as though it were in his own driveway. Poke envies it. “What would you do in my position?”
Arthit sighs into the mouthpiece. “I’ve been thinking about that for days. I have nothing that might make a real difference, and my instinct is that you shouldn’t do anything at all until we’ve got a better idea. Do your rabbit thing. Keep still and stay out of their line of vision.”
“So if you were me, you wouldn’t go in and try to explain. You know, confront the problem head-on and all that.”
“No,” Arthit says. “If I could get my list of alternative courses of action up to ninety or a hundred, that would still be the one on the bottom.”
After this conversation Arthit stops calling for a few days, which is fine with Rafferty; he’s already as depressed as he can be without losing his ability to think straight.
On day two, waiting in the backseat while the doctor and nurse are tending to someone inside a fancy condominium, he calls Rose’s new phone with his own new phone, just to hear the voice of someone who cares about him.
He says, “I’m lonely.”
“I could send you Miaow. There are worse things than being lonely. What’s going on down there?”
“I’m being nowhere. Riding around in cars all day and sleeping in boom-boom hotels at night. You’d like my new hairstyle.”
“We’re sleeping on folded clothes, half an inch thick. Oh, forget it, I’m sorry. I have no business whining to you about anything. Even Miaow’s worried, during the brief moments when she’s not feeling personally inconvenienced by the weather.”