28
“I went around the block half a dozen times,” Rafferty says. There are candles burning on the living-room table, and Arthit clearly hadn’t been expecting anyone. He feels very much like the uninvited guest, so he’s making small talk to soften his entrance. “Nobody seemed to be watching the house.”
“It’s kind of surprising,” Arthit says. He blows out the candles and glances at Anna, who immediately drops her eyes in a way that probably looks demure to Arthit but to Rafferty looks like a plain old guilty conscience. “I keep checking,” Arthit says, turning on the lights. “It’s been that way for days, which is odd. There’s nothing my superiors would rather do than hang me out the window in the rain.”
Anna holds up her pad, aiming it at Poke. It says, You’ve been careful? When she glances up at Poke, she catches him staring and gives him a tentative smile. He smiles back, his face as stiff as cardboard.
“Careful as I can be,” he says.
Arthit hasn’t sat yet. He says, “You want a drink?”
“Beer would be nice.”
“Fine.” He turns toward the dining room, but Anna is up and on her way, motioning Arthit back to the couch.
“I feel guilty,” Arthit says as he sits down.
“About what?”
“All this.” He raises his chin in the direction Anna took. “I’m here, feeling like I’m living in a greeting card, while you’re out there with half the world looking for you.”
“I’m doing okay,” Rafferty says. “And you have a life to live.”
“I hope so. I mean, I know so. And I know that this will be over soon, and we’ll all be back to normal. But I wish Rose had been around to get used to … this …” he says, with a vague circular gesture that takes in the two of them and Anna, in the other room. “I wish she could have gone through it in stages, like I did, instead of being presented with it in full bloom, so to speak, when she gets back.” His tone is light, but his eyes hold Poke’s. “She loved Noi so much.” He stops and swallows. “Will she be okay with it?”
“I can’t say,” Poke tells him. “We’ll have to let time sort it out.” He feels the coldness of the answer. “Everything is … good with the two of you?”
Arthit says, “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.” He turns his head a few inches toward the dining room and continues. “She’s not Noi, I know that, but no one is. No one ever could be. But she’s not like anyone I’ve ever known, and-” He looks down at his knees and crosses his blunt, dark hands in his lap. The lamp makes his gold wedding band gleam. He shrugs. “And I think she loves me.”
There’s no way around it. “I’m sure she does.” His throat feels so tight he’s surprised Arthit can’t hear it.
“I didn’t mean to talk about this,” Arthit says, “You’ve got all these problems, and I’m rattling along about being in love. Please forgive me. You’ve got something important to talk about.”
“It’s all important,” Rafferty says, automatically. While Anna’s still out of the room, he asks, “Did Kosit follow Eddie Bland from the airport?”
“Straight to a big house that turns out to be Murphy’s. Still there. And he’s booked back to Kuala Lumpur at midnight, so he’ll probably stay put till then.”
“I guess Kosit can go home, then,” Rafferty says, getting up as Anna comes into the room, a middle-height, sturdily built woman who moves like a very light one. The businesslike chop of her hair bares her face, her smooth brow, her wide-set, guileless eyes. She hands him the beer in a bottle and smiles, then closes her eyes and screws up her face with effort.
Arthit watches with an expression halfway between apprehension and fierce pride.
Anna, her eyes still closed, says, slowly and tonelessly, “No … glass.” Her eyes fly wide open and go to Arthit’s, and he’s beaming from ear to ear. She drops her head to hide her own smile and turns deep red, and Rafferty wishes lightning would strike him where he stands.
Anna gives him a shy, quick glance and hands Arthit a glass with a good four fingers’ worth of whiskey in it. Then she mimes wiping sweat off her forehead and collapses beside him on the couch, letting her head drop onto his shoulder.
“We’ve been working on that,” Arthit says. He rests his free hand on her thigh. “She thinks she sounds ugly when she talks. But she doesn’t.” He catches himself and shakes his head. “Please. Let’s talk about your problems.”
“Well, first,” Rafferty says, sitting, “I’m very happy for both of you.”
Anna says, out loud, “Thank you.” She drags out the a on “thank” a bit experimentally and gives both words the same pitch and the same stress, but her voice is low and pleasant, coming from someplace in the center of her chest. Arthit’s face, as he watches her, is as transparent as water.
“So,” Rafferty says, mostly to break the moment, because it’s too painful to look at, “I want to bounce something off you.”
“Anything,” Arthit says. “And if I can help, tell me.”
“No, I don’t want to involve you. But you can give me an opinion.” He tries not to glace at Anna and fails. She smiles encouragingly.
“Helen Eckersley,” he says. “The woman in Cheyenne.” For a wild, panicked moment, remembers that when he talked to Anna last, he said, “Helena,” but she hasn’t noticed the change; perhaps it’s the difficulty in lip-reading either word. And Arthit doesn’t know that Eckersley is dead, that she was Vietnamese, a survivor of the massacre in the Delta, but he knows he hasn’t. They’ve barely spoken, beyond immediate needs, for days. It’s Ming Li he’s been talking with. “I called her in the States, starting a few days back. Left three or four messages on her machine. I never talked to her. But she called me a couple of days ago. She’s here. She wants to meet me.”
Arthit says, “Mmm-hmm,” but there’s nothing in his face. Anna’s eyes, on the other hand, are sharp with interest.
“So I’m thinking about doing it.”
Arthit looks over Poke’s shoulder, in the general direction of the front door, and Poke knows he’s thinking. “For what purpose?”
“She was the last person on Sellers’s mind. She was important to him. Part of my problem is that I don’t know who he actually was or why he was killed.” He’s never lied to Arthit before, and every sentence makes him feel more counterfeit. “She might be able to tell me-I don’t know-who he was, beyond his name, what he was doing here. What his relationship was with Murphy.”
“What if she’s a plant of some kind? What if Murphy-”
“They didn’t know her name, remember? That’s why they were after me in the first place.”
“Suppose they figured it out somehow,” Arthit says. “Suppose it’s not even really the same person. Suppose it’s a trap and she’s just some floater, just some burnout he’s picked up and paid a few hundred bucks to call you and try to set up a meeting.”
Anna is writing, and when she lifts the pad, the words startle him. It says, No. Too dangerous.
“I followed her today,” Rafferty says, and Anna sits just a tiny bit straighter. “She went to the place where Sellers was shot. Stood in the rain in the middle of the spilled paint, praying.”
Arthit says, “Doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was a show. Maybe they knew you’d be following her.”
They certainly did, Poke thinks. “Maybe. But maybe she’s got something I need to know to get myself out of this. It’s pointless to pretend they’re not going to find me sooner or later.”
“I still don’t think you should do it, but if you do, where?”
“The new shopping mall on Rama IV. At the peak of business, about eight-thirty tomorrow night. We-I-spent part of the day checking it out.”
Arthit says, “ ‘We’?”
“A friend.”
Arthit nods, but he’s obviously stored the evasion to question it later. “So there will be people around.”
“Thousands of them. Not the kind of place to make a big fuss.”
“Good and bad both,” Arthit says. “It also means they can salt the crowd. And getting out can be a problem.”