Ahead of him, through an eight-foot archway, is a blinding kitchen, all reddish saltillo tile, pale beige granite, and white appliances, as brilliantly lit as an operating room. He stands in the archway between the dining room and the kitchen, listening. Now that the phones have gone silent, he hears rain on the windows and the pat-pat-pat of a leak, water dripping onto fabric.
And then he smells something. It’s faint and sharp at the same time, like urine on a floor two or three rooms away, or the germy odor of dirty clothes that have been piled damp in a hamper for days. The door creaks behind him. He turns, but it’s swaying back and forth by itself, obeying the air currents that ghost through the room.
He leaves it ajar and goes back toward the entrance hall, thinking about calling Ming Li, but what’s he going to say? There’s a spook in here with me? He knows who it is, and he’s pretty sure he’s not afraid of her.
So he takes the stairs, two at a time, stands at the top for a moment, and decides to start with the most distant door and work his way back. The door at the end opens into what is clearly the master bedroom, the size of a small ballroom with a vaulted ceiling. It looks to him like it was decorated by the birds who drape Disney heroines in badly designed gowns: an acre of shell pink organdy hangs from a towering frame above the king-size bed, which is mounded with enormous pastel pillows, like big Valentine candies. The wall to the right is mirrored from floor to ceiling, reflecting an ambitious home gym: treadmill, rowing machine, and a couple of hinged and counterweighted contraptions whose function he can only guess at. An overstuffed couch and a table jostle each other under the front window. Money-quite a bit of it-has been misspent here.
The newer wife, he thinks.
He angles across the room, smelling sachet and face powder and the raw, jangly perfume of hair spray, into a bathroom so prettied up it seems like an architectural euphemism for the natural functions it was built to accommodate. A connecting door opens into a smaller room.
Clearly this is where Murphy recharges his prodigious, murderous energy. The carpet was either never laid or has been peeled back, baring a floor of gray, industrial cement. A narrow single bed has a paper-thin pillow and two rough blankets thrown over it. At the foot of the bed is an olive green, army-issue trunk, securely locked, and on the opposite wall is a rough, barely finished wooden dresser with white china knobs on the drawers. Above the dresser, set into the wall where a mirror might be, is a gun safe, which is locked as tightly as the chest. The furniture is dented and scratched, and as Rafferty looks around the room, he has the sense that this value-free assemblage of chipped, hard-surfaced junk has followed Murphy from place to place, while a succession of newly graduated village girls filled the other rooms of houses just like this one with the imitation lives they’d seen on television.
Being in Murphy’s room brings back the sense of pressurized fury he’d experienced when he saw the man face-to-face. He has an impulse to call Janos, but instead he looks at his watch-6:52. He’s been inside for only fourteen minutes. Murphy doesn’t expect him to show up at the shopping plaza until eight or eight-thirty. He’s got plenty of time.
Then why is he so frightened?
Murphy is pacing the rear office area of a sixth-floor clothing store, fighting a case of the jitters and telling Andrea Fallon, the aging Khao San junkie posing as Helen Eckersley, for the third time what she’s supposed to do when Rafferty finally shows up. He knows he’s repeating himself, but some little animal in his chest is clawing to get his attention. Andrea is just barely not rolling her eyes when his cell phone rings. He glances at the readout, which says ALARM.
As he looks at the word, the little animal in his chest begins to use its teeth. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Murphy, we’ve got an entry at your house, but someone there diverted the alarm to the telephones. No one is answering.”
“How long ago?”
“How long-”
“How long since the relay came through your office to ring the phones?”
“A little less than fifteen minutes.”
“What the fuck have you been doing for fifteen minutes?”
“We didn’t have this number in the main file. We had to look at your forms-”
“You dumb shit.” Murphy punches the DISCONNECT button so hard he cracks the screen. “Get out of here,” he says to Fallon. “Call me tomorrow for the rest of your money.”
“Yeah, right,” Fallon says, “and you’ll mail me the check.” She holds out her hand, palm up. “Gimme.”
“Oh, sure,” Murphy says. “Sure thing.” He grabs her upper arm, pinching the area between the bicep and the bone viciously enough to make her gasp. With his other hand he seizes her wrist and brings her open hand up into her face, with enough force to send her staggering back to the wall, blood streaming from her split lip. “Clean yourself up and get out of here.”
He leaves her leaning against the wall, swearing at him, and goes out into the store. Despite the external display of anger, there’s a kind of glee at his center, and his vision and hearing are amplified. He feels like he could hear a whisper a mile away. It’s a state of consciousness he loves.
The immediate problem, of course, is getting out. If Rafferty’s not here, he’s got someone else here, on the lookout. The store is obviously being watched. The only way out without taking the escalator, in full view of a thousand people, is the staircase he came up. The entrance to the stairs is about eight meters from the door to the shop. Left, from his perspective.
As always when he’s in this state, ideas announce themselves to him complete and fully formed.
“You,” he says softly to the woman who seems to be in charge. “Don’t say no, don’t give me any shit, don’t attract any attention, just do what I tell you to do, or three days from now there’ll be a toy store in this space. Are you listening?”‘
“Yes,” she says, and a part of him registers the thick, badly applied makeup, the sickly perfume with the pampered-animal smell beneath it, the fragility of her neck.
“That one, over there,” he says, pointing at a salesgirl who, like the manager, is as tall and lean as a fashion model. “Get her.”
While the woman scurries to do his bidding, Murphy puts his hands under one of the heavy rods the dresses hang from and pushes up. As he hoped it would, it lifts easily from the wall bracket. He pulls it down and steps behind the counter, where he tilts the rod until all the clothes slide to the floor, leaving him holding a round bar about seven feet in length. To the two approaching women, their eyes on the spill of clothes, he says, “The longest things you’ve got, dresses, coats, I don’t care what they are, but they’ve got to be long. Understand?”
The manager starts to say something, but Murphy feels his eyes widen, and she retreats, calling instructions in Thai to the other woman. Customers are beginning to pay attention as the two of them scoop clothes from displays everywhere in the store, throw them over their arms and shoulders, and hurry back to Murphy, who holds the pole horizontal.
“Hang ’em up. Jam them together. I want a wall, you got it?” He holds the bar by one end, the other end slanted up slightly, and the women hook hangers over it until it’s about three-quarters full, the clothes sliding down to his end to be smashed together by gravity. Murphy says, “Fill it up.”
The saleswoman says, “The clothes,” and Murphy whirls on her so fast that some of the hangers fly off the other end of the rod. “I’m not going to tell you again.”
A customer backs out of the store, followed by another.
The saleswoman takes off at a run. Fifteen seconds later the rod is packed with hanging clothes. Murphy shoves the garments on the near end together to bare about a foot of rod. “On your shoulder,” he says to the manager. Then he clears the other end and sets it, not particularly gently, on the salesgirl’s shoulder. “Put your hand on it, stupid. If it falls off, you’ll be sorry for the rest of your short, shitty life. Now, stay there.”