She turns her back on Bangkok and gives him her eyes, full bore, and he’s pierced by the thought that she’s becoming a beautiful woman. “Are you shitting me?”
“What kind of language is …?”
“I’ve seen the alternatives. Hanging around with girls just like me, picking on girls who aren’t just like me, buying ugly clothes with famous names to appeal to boys who talk through their noses and think tattoos are really daring. Whoa, dude, take your life in your hands, light a cigarette. Hey, man, let’s rebel by refusing to learn anything. Let’s be dull, stupid, ordinary kids who are looking forward to being dull, stupid, ordinary adults. No thanks, and with change. And by the way, I don’t see you living in some plaid-shirt American town and flashing your junk at Builders Emporium all weekend.”
“You can thank Frank for that, too.”
“Oh, of course, you poor baby. You chased your terrible runaway father all the way to Asia, such a sad story. And look how badly it’s worked out. You’re living here, married to the best-looking woman in the world, with a daughter who’s-”
“Okay, okay.”
“Lighten up on Frank. He gave me that money for you, he stole that passport. And you know what else? We could use him. I’d take him over Ivan the Useless, or whatever that guy’s name is, any day.”
“Not me,” Rafferty says. “I know Vladimir’s a cheat and a liar and that he’d sell me out in a minute. But I keep expecting Frank to be something else.”
“Like what?”
He feels silly as he says it, but he can’t not say it. “A father.”
“Oh, you’re so breaking my heart. Tell you what. Let’s just ignore each other.”
“We’re both upset,” Rafferty says.
“Gee. You think?” She looks at her watch. “We should be there by now.”
“You here now,” the driver says, angling sharply to the curb. And there it is, a big, brightly lit store with a bunch of creatively melted and fractured mannequins in the window and the word ZOMBIETOWN in letters that look like the Hollywood sign. Ming Li reaches across the seat and jabs Rafferty with her forefinger.
“Sorry.”
He hands the driver the fare. “Both of us. Imagine living through that.”
“Why did he kill her?”
One of the fluorescents in the store flickers out, and Rafferty says, “Later. Let’s get in there so they can close up and go home.”
The store smells like a freshly opened box of latex gloves. The young salesgirl who hurries to help them wears a fraying bedsheet, a stringy wig of dead white hair, and two ounces of face powder. She’s drawn a gruesome red scar down her left cheek, with stitches of black thread glued in place. After the green apartment, it’s so innocent it makes Rafferty want to weep. She looks at both of them, clearly trying to find a racial classification, and gives up. In careful English she says, “Welcome to Zombietown. I am the Mistress of the Night.”
“Whoo,” Rafferty says, rubbing his arms with a shudder that surprises him by being real. In return he gets a grin, rich in plastic fangs. In Thai he says, “I want something, a mask, that wears glasses.”
“Of course,” says the Mistress of the Night, in English. “Glasses.”
Ming Li says, “Why do we want glasses? Actually, what are we doing here?”
“One thing at a time.” They follow the Mistress of the Night toward the back of the store. She calls out to someone, putting a little edge into it, and the lights snap back on. The Mistress of the Night turns dramatically and raises an open hand in a sweeping gesture that takes in a segment of wall hung with plastic masks of the full-size, pull-over-the-heard variety.
She looks at Ming Li and says, in English, “For your daughter?”
“Sister,” Rafferty says. “No, bigger. For me.” He points at a goofy-looking face with buckteeth, sleepy eyes, a lopsided grin, and a pair of black-framed glasses hanging from ears like cup handles. “Him.”
“Mortimer Snerd,” the Queen of the Night says doubtfully. “Not very scary.”
“Really?” Rafferty says. “I think he’s terrifying.”
In yet another cab, Rafferty fumbles with the X-acto knife the Mistress of the Night sold him. The fourth time the driver hits a bump, Ming Li says, “Oh, give it here.” The cab reaches the bottom of a ten-degree grade and plows into a temporary lake, hydroplaning briefly and skewing sickeningly to the left, until the driver slows and the tires find the pavement again. The moment the cab loses contact with the street, Ming Li lifts the knife’s point an inch above the surface of the mask and waits.
Rafferty says, “Don’t cut yourself.”
“You know,” she says, going back to working the knife very precisely through the rubber, “if you hadn’t said that, I absolutely would have cut myself. ‘Don’t fall down the stairs,’ ” she says through her nose. “ ‘Don’t hit your thumb with that hammer.’ ‘Don’t crawl into the refrigerator and pull the door closed and die there.’ Welcome to the Useless Warnings Brigade.”
“I had to say something.”
“If you have to say something, tell me why he killed her.”
“Right.” He settles back and closes his eyes for a second. “Well, the first thing is that I don’t actually know anything. This is all guesses.”
“Guesses are a beginning.”
“Okay. Okay, okay, okay.” Now he’s gazing through the window, trying to assemble the chronology. “I think Murphy was looking for Sellers and Helen-sorry, Bey-off and on for years. Practically ever since he found out about them, after Americans were allowed back into Vietnam. But it got really important in the past four or five years, as his stock started to go up with the American spooks and he had even more to lose. The Islamic unrest started here, and the Americans needed someone who could do dirty work but be deniable. He’s perfect for them. He’s former Phoenix Program, so he knows the drill, he’s even had a security clearance, and he’s in business all over Southeast Asia. He’s the ideal listening post, and he can go operational, too. So one day some aging general in Washington says, ‘What about old Murphy?’ and they pick up the phone and give him a call.”
Ming Li is holding the knife still and watching the windshield wipers lose their fight with the rain as she listens. “Yeah?”
“So for Murphy it’s the golden ring. Suddenly he’s got the government helping with his business, making his cover look even better, throwing contracts at him. But there’s a problem, and that’s what happened in that village. Given to the wrong media, the wrong administration, it could destroy him. So all of a sudden, catching up to Bey and Billie Joe moves way up his to-do list.”
“And,” Ming Li says, “he’s got new resources now. To help him find them.”
“And he did,” Rafferty says.
“And they hurt her for twenty-four-”
“Trying to make her tell them-”
“-where Billie Joe is.”
“So about five days before Billie Joe runs into me,” Rafferty says, “she tells them what they wanted to know-”
“And what she says is, ‘He’s here, in Thailand,’ except they can’t pin down his exact location. But they’ve got some sort of pipeline to him, and to draw him they set up that thing you got in the middle of. And it does draw him, and they do the dirty. And Murphy thinks he can relax, except that suddenly you’re there and Billie Joe talked to you.”
“And let’s not forget, there may be something in Yala, which probably has its own calendar. So Murphy might be getting squeezed from three or four directions at once.”
They both think for a moment. The driver says, “At once,” and Ming Li jumps, but Rafferty shakes his head. The guy’s just trying out the phrase.
“You said the government might pay him through his company,” Ming Li says, lowering her voice. “Why would they do it that way?”
“You tell me. Vladimir wouldn’t have asked that question.”
Ming Li gives him a sour smile and finishes her work on the mask. She sheathes the X-acto carefully and says, “So it looks legit if the money transfers are revealed. So they can deny any spook connection.”