"Looks like you, too," Frank says. "It's the bone structure." He is sitting in a chair about a yard away from Rafferty, his face haloed by a fringe of white hair. Ming Li stands beside him, a pale hand resting on his shoulder.
Rafferty regards Ming Li, who gives him a cool downward gaze. "You and I don't look alike," he says to Frank.
Frank shrugs. "You may not want my bone structure," he says, "but you've got it."
"I hope that's all we've got in common."
Frank pushes his chair back a couple of inches. "Why don't we postpone all that for now? Recriminations and hurt feelings and so forth. It's not very appealing under the best of circumstances, and these aren't them. I've kept up with you, Poke-from a distance, obviously. I've read your books, checked into what you're up to here in Bangkok. You're making a nice life for yourself, aren't you?"
"Checked how? "
Frank shrugs again. "Usual channels." Except for a slight stoop, a lot of missing hair, and that shuffling walk, he looks surprisingly like the man Rafferty remembers from all those years ago. He has to be in his seventies, but time has barely laid a glove on him. It strikes Rafferty for the hundredth time that serenity and selfishness aren't that dissimilar. They both keep people young. His mother, even with her Filipina blood, has aged much more than his father has.
Rafferty says, "I don't know what 'usual' means to you. I don't know anything about you at all. And I didn't get much help from that woman in Shanghai-"
"Ming Li's mother," Frank says evenly.
"-from Ming Li's mother. And of course you couldn't be bothered, could you? You were busy or something."
"I was impressed you'd found us."
"Well, that makes me feel warm all over. Imagine what a home run it would have been if you'd said it in person." He shifts in the chair. "You can take the cuffs off."
"You're sure?" Frank seems amused, and Rafferty realizes he has seen precisely the same expression on Ming Li's face.
"It was an impulse. It's passed. I'd still like to bust you one, but you're safe in front of your daughter."
Ming Li laughs, and after a long moment Frank joins her. "Go ahead," she says. "Hit him. Frank gets hit a lot."
"I'd imagine."
"Get the cuffs off, Leung. He's going to be nice." Frank watches as Leung emerges from the shadows to move behind Rafferty and free his wrists.
"Another of yours?" Poke rubs his hands together to restore circulation.
"No. He has the misfortune to be a friend."
"No problem," Leung says. He twirls the cuffs around his index finger. He has high Tibetan cheekbones, narrow eyes of a startlingly pale brown, and a wide mouth that smiles easily, although the smile does not make him look any more cheerful. For all the effect it has on his eyes, it might as well be on someone else's face.
Rafferty looks at Leung's smiling, cheerless expression and recognizes one of the people who don't like other humans because they've seen too much of them. This is the group from which professional killers are recruited. "Aside from all the obvious reasons," Rafferty asks, "why is it a misfortune to be your friend?"
"Well," Frank says, shifting on his seat. It is a hedge, and for a moment Rafferty feels satisfaction at his father's discomfort. "That's what we have to talk about."
"You live rather publicly," Frank says. There is a damped disapproval in his tone.
Even at six-thirty on this Saturday evening, the restaurant is crowded with Thais in large groups, wet and noisily merry as though the warm rain, which has begun again, is a personal joke. When they entered, Frank had said something into the ear of the woman who greeted them, and she'd shown them to a small booth against the back wall, where they can see the entire room and hear each other without shouting. They had made the trip in two tuk-tuks-Frank, Ming Li, and Rafferty riding silently in the first and Leung solo in the second. Covering their backs, Rafferty figures.
"I've got no reason to sneak around," Rafferty says.
Frank turns over a reasonable palm. "Just an observation, Poke. In Bangkok-hell, in Asia-information is money. No need to make it so accessible."
"For me, money is money. Information is just information." The booth is a tight fit. Rafferty is jammed next to Leung, who had come in a few minutes after them and then scanned the room, as objective as a metal detector, before joining them. Rafferty can smell Leung's wet clothes, cigarettes, and a hair oil that owes a distant debt to bay rum. Pressing up against Rafferty's hip is a hard object in Leung's pocket that Rafferty assumes is a gun, which means that at least two of the three in Frank's party are packing. Ming Li sits beside Frank, surveying Poke with a curiosity she had not displayed in the garage. Even dripping water she is beautiful.
"You never know what the local currency is," Frank is saying. "The first time I saw the little girl I thought, whoops, the boy's a twist, where did I go wrong? But you were so public with her. The real twists don't like daylight. And then, of course, I saw the woman. What's her name again?"
Rafferty does not reply.
"Rose, right? Amazingly beautiful, isn't she? Very reassuring, knowing you've got taste like that."
"I assume there's more to this miraculous reappearance than a sudden need to express approval of my life."
Frank lifts a cup of coffee and puts it down untouched. Poke is startled to see the age spots on the back of his hand. "At your age, Poke, you shouldn't still be harping on all that. I know it's fashionable in America for adults to blame their parents for everything they did or didn't do, but the general feeling here is, get over it. One more example of the wisdom of the East."
"Gee, I don't know." Rafferty turns his eyes to Ming Li. "Give me some of the wisdom of the East. You're half qualified. Let's suppose one day-two days after Christmas, as it turns out-old Frank here just took a walk. Went out to buy a pound of rice and some dried shrimp and never came back. Left you and your mother flat, hopped a plane across the Pacific. Didn't even bother to say, 'Hey, good-bye, see you later, take care of your mom, kid.'"
"My mother can take care of herself," Ming Li says. "If she couldn't, she'd be dead."
"Oh, that's right, I forgot. He left her, too, didn't he? Sort of a leitmotif, isn't it? Like background music. 'Frank's Theme.'"
Something flickers in Ming Li's eyes. "He came back."
"And you're… what? Nineteen, twenty?"
"Twenty-two," she says. "Frank looks young for his age, and so do I. You, too, actually." Her long fingers are curled around a cup of tea.
"You work fast," Rafferty says to Frank.
"It would have been faster, but China's a big place," Frank says. "I had to find my wife first."
The babble of conversation in the restaurant stumbles up against one of those mysterious group pauses, and Poke says, into the silence, "Your wife was in fucking Lancaster, California."
"My first wife," Frank says placidly.
The words seem to shrink the booth and squeeze them all closer to one another, and Rafferty pushes himself back against the padding to find some distance, keeping his face empty. "Ah. Gosh, I guess we're finally having that father-son chat."
"I met her when she was twelve years old." Frank ignores Poke's tone. "She was washing sheets in a brothel in Shanghai."
"I don't really want to know," Rafferty says, thinking, Twelve?
"And I don't really give a good goddamn whether you want to know. I'm telling you because I have to." He has leaned forward sharply, his hands curved stiffly around the perimeter of his saucer, and the coffee slops onto his left hand as the cup slides forward. If it burns, he ignores it. "You need to understand what's going on, because it involves you now."