“He stayed near the village for a month in a small hotel, but he came to us every day. On the fifth day, he asked Bey to marry him. He said he’d thought about her-” Thuy’s voice breaks, and she passes a forearm across her face. “He’d thought about Bey every day since he left Vietnam. Every day. He … ahhh-” She sniffs again. “He showed her pictures of his house. He proposed very formally. But Bey said she had to stay and take care of me.”
“And I said I could take care of you,” Jiang said. “Not that you need to be taken care of.”
Ming Li says, “Aww,” and wipes her cheeks.
“She said yes. How could she not say yes? He’d saved us. He could have been killed himself. Murphy would have blown him to pieces if they’d seen him helping us, but he did it. So she said yes, and he said he would work things so she could go to America with him. Because they were married, right? And then he told us he had a way to get Jiang and me out of the country when he came back in four months and that we should let him do it. We should go wherever he wanted to put us.”
Knowing the answer, Rafferty says, “Because.”
“Because Murphy had probably learned we were alive. Because he had become very powerful. Because some reporter had written about our village from an interview he did with one of the Vietnamese troopers, and he’d said there were survivors. Because the story of the village was being denied. Because the truth of what happened could destroy Murphy. Because Murphy would be coming for us.”
23
They’d been in Bangkok for twelve years, arriving after spending two years in a village in the northeast, learning some Thai and staying out of sight. While they were there, Americans, obviously former soldiers-not Murphy, but probably working for him-had come to the reconstructed village in Vietnam several times, asking about survivors who had lived there during the war. But no one knew where Thuy, Jiang, and the two now-grown children were, just that Bey had gone to America with her husband.
And because no one had warned them not to, they told the men Bey’s husband’s name, making the mistake that, years later, would result in Bey’s being beaten to death in a cold little house in Wyoming.
“What can you do?” Jiang asks. “They’re just people. They don’t know how to lie.”
Rafferty says, “You have a very good heart.”
Billie Joe had bought the dry-cleaning shop for them before he brought them to Bangkok, and he’d taken the lease on the apartment. The name on the lease was a Thai name, no way to trace them through that. The shop was in the same name.
“Did you know that Billie Joe was in Bangkok this time?” Rafferty says. He is folding a piece of paper on which Jiang has written in Vietnamese two words he asked her to write.
“No,” Thuy says. “He never call or come say hello.”
Jiang says, “What will you do?”
“Well,” Rafferty says, “I don’t think I have any choice. I’m going to try to destroy Murphy.”
Both women look down, unwilling to show him the doubt in their eyes.
“It’s okay,” Rafferty says. “I barely believe it myself.”
He puts the folded paper into the pocket of his T-shirt. “Are you going someplace new?”
“Yes,” says Thuy. “Back to the northeast.”
“Good, good. Don’t tell me any more. Does the shop have voice mail?” He turns to Ming Li and reaches down to give her a hand, but she tucks her feet under her and rises in a single, smooth movement, her bag already in her hand.
“Yes,” Thuy says. “Have.”
“I’ll call here and leave a message if I make it, if Murphy is finished. If you don’t hear from me, I guess you’ll have to figure that Murphy won.”
Ming Li says, “He’s smarter than he looks. My brother, I mean.”
“He look pretty smart,” Thuy says kindly.
“Thank you for talking to us,” Ming Li says. “We’re very sorry to have made you so unhappy.”
Thuy says, “Truth is always best.” Then she starts crying, full out, as though she’s just this moment heard the news of her sister’s death.
At the door Rafferty looks around again. They live very sparely: a bed that doubles as a couch, a threadbare chair with a deeply dented cushion, a small television on a low black table that’s ornately inlaid with abalone, a two-burner hot plate, and a waist-high refrigerator. Another bright calendar on the wall, this one from last year. A few books in Vietnamese. The bathroom, where they probably wash the dishes, is just a tiny box of a room with a sink and a showerhead dangling at the end of a length of flexible tubing. It hangs on a hook above a damp concrete floor that slopes down to a central drain.
The awful green walls.
Rafferty asks Jiang, “Who made the handprints?”
Jiang says, “They’re from the family who lived here before us. My mother bought this paint very cheap, and we put on two coats to hide them, but after a few months the little hands came through. Cheap paint, it doesn’t cover anything. I wanted to paint again because this color is so ugly, but she wouldn’t let me. She says the handprints are really-”
“The village,” Thuy says, rubbing an arm across her ravaged eyes. “The children in the village. They stay with us now.”
Since Thais love an excuse for a party, most Western holiday celebrations have found fertile soil in Bangkok, and Halloween has done even better than others. It takes Ming Li about six minutes with her iPhone and Google Translate to find a Halloween store, near enough for them to get there before closing.
They ride through the monotony of the rain without speaking, their ears ringing with the story Thuy and Jiang told, with the images of the three captive boys and the children in the hut. The cabbie has Thai pop on the radio instead of the flood news, although he cranks it down when they get in. Ming Li wrinkles her nose at it and stares out the window, looking like someone studying a landscape of regret. Staring out his own window, Rafferty hears her sigh.
It’s almost eight o’clock, the hour when one Bangkok turns into another Bangkok, folding the worn-out day neatly and putting it away, amping up the energy for the night. Some neighborhoods disappear into gloom while others suddenly flower, as streets that were nondescript in daylight put on their feather boas and bright sequins, and bloom revealed in their true colors, like some mousy male bank clerk who goes home, rinses off the dust, changes clothes, names, and sexes, and emerges as Fabulosa, Queen of the Night.
“Bangkok may not be glamorous,” Rafferty says as they pass a pink-lit bar, the door flanked by hostesses shivering in cheap, shiny gowns and elbow-length gloves, “but it’s got lurid down cold.”
Ming Li doesn’t even grunt. Ten minutes into the ride, she says, “It would be nice if something really terrible happened to that man.”
“I can but try,” Rafferty says.
“I want to be in the middle of it.” She sounds like someone in an argument that’s been going on so long it’s become chronic.
“We’ll see.”
“You couldn’t have followed those women home.”
“I could have if they hadn’t already seen me.”
“Yeah, and if your grandmother had wheels, she’d be a tea cart.”
“Frank,” Rafferty says. “Frank used to say that.”
This time Ming Li does grunt.
“Does it ever worry you?” he asks. “How he’s shaped you, what he’s turned you into?”