Arthit automatically looks at his watch and says, "Four-twenty- three." Then his shoulders sag and his head droops forward. "You," he says to Poke without turning. "Get out of here."
24
Major-League Heat
I killed him, Poke thinks. I didn't mention the triad, and I killed him. With Prettyman's death reverberating in his mind, the day he originally planned, a day he meant to spend dealing with the counterfeiting situation, suddenly seems irrelevant. The threat seems almost quaint. The new day's first light is tinting the sky as he uses the key Arthit gave him to open the front door of the house. He locks it behind him and trudges into the living room, weighing several thousand pounds.
Rose is asleep on the couch. A yellow cotton blanket covers her to the shoulders. Her knees are drawn up-the couch is too short for her-and one arm is outthrown, the hand dangling at the wrist, palm up. There is something terribly vulnerable in that loose hand, with its pale palm and curled fingers.
Rose is not a light sleeper, and she doesn't stir as he approaches her.
He kneels to examine the face he has come to love: the mouth, its upper lip high in the middle and the lower full and generous. The delicate seashell whorl of her nostrils, perhaps the most beautiful curve he has ever seen. The smooth swelling of her cheekbones. He studies her face, every detail, for at least five minutes.
She and Miaow are his life now. Nothing that concerns them is irrelevant.
Then he turns around and goes out into the paling day to hail a tuk-tuk.
Just to be on the safe side, he takes the tuk-tuk for a few blocks and gets out, waiting to see whether anyone seems to be paying attention to him. At this hour, though, there is virtually no one on the streets. He hails a cab, makes the driver circle his building three times as he looks for watchers, and then has the man drop him in the basement garage.
To avoid the noise of the elevator in case someone is waiting on his floor, he takes the stairs. He gets all the way to the fifth floor, each step a yard high, before he remembers that the doors are locked on each floor. Muttering unflattering self-appraisal, he goes back down to the lobby, crosses his fingers, and pushes the "up" button.
Not much he can do when the elevator doors open except stand as far as possible to one side with the gun out. The hallway is empty.
It takes him a couple of minutes to work the pick out of the lock and insert his own key. When he pulls the key back, it slips out as though it has been greased. He thinks briefly of kicking the door into small pieces but decides that the satisfaction isn't worth the noise and enters the apartment with his gun in both hands.
He needn't have bothered. The place is deserted.
It takes only a few minutes to get what he needs, a change of clothes for all of them and-as an afterthought-Miaow's new cell phone, which she had left on top of her desk, surrounded by a circlet of browning ginger flowers like a small metallic shrine. The bag of counterfeit money, much to his relief, is still in its hiding place on the top shelf of the closet. The men last night had been looking for people, not loot. From the safe concealed in the headboard above his bed, he removes his third ammunition clip and the rest of his own reserve of money. He will need every baht of it. On the way out, he makes one more stop in the kitchen to get a jar of Nescafe for Rose, who lives on it, since he's not sure Noi will have any in her kitchen. He throws it all into a canvas tote bag, takes a last, regretful look around, and heads for the stairs.
As he reaches the seventh floor, his cell phone rings. "Where the hell are you?" Arthit demands. "How nice to hear your voice." "Why aren't you at my house? You're not supposed to be out wandering around." He can hear Noi's voice in the background, questioning and concerned. "Tell me you haven't gone someplace really stupid," Arthit says. "Your apartment, for example." "Okay, I won't tell you I went to my apartment." "There are moments, long moments, when I doubt your sanity. You're contaminated now. There's no way you can come back here until I can arrange something so complicated it would take a small army to track it." "I've got things to do. I won't come back without calling you." "You certainly won't." "Are we still on to creep Elson?" "We are. I need some sleep first." "So why aren't you getting it?" "The chopper choppers," Arthit says. "The boys downstairs from the apartment we visited a few hours ago." "Yes, Arthit? Are you going to make me ask you about them?" "Aren't we touchy this morning? Four guys, they said. Three of them you've already met, by the descriptions. The fourth was a very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies. Military-looking, they said." "Anything more? A tonsure, a third eye, or anything? Something that would distinguish him from any other very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies?" "One of those moles the Chinese seem to admire. About the size of a ten-baht coin-or, to translate it into American for you, a quarter- with hairs growing out of it. Three or four inches long." "How'd they know he was Chinese? As opposed, say, to Korean." "One of the boys has a Chinese mother. He heard the thin man swear at one of the others in what is apparently a timelessly popular Chinese oath." "They hear any names?" "If they had heard any names," Arthit says, more than a bit briskly, "do you think that information would be so far down on this list?" "Sorry. Guess we're both a little cranky." "Well," Arthit says, "when you want some sleep, call me and I'll arrange some way for you to get to my place." He yawns. "I'll phone you later. And, Poke?"
"Yeah?"
"Try to keep today's to-do list of stupid things really short. You might limit it to the one you've already done."
"My phone's breaking up," Rafferty says. He punches it off and slips it into his pocket. Then, for the second time in less than six hours, he walks away from the place he has grown to think of as home.
In the Silom branch of Coffee World, he fools around on Google for thirty minutes or so as he drinks a quart of black coffee with half a dozen shots of espresso thrown in to raise the octane level. The words "Chinese triads" bring up 1,180,000 hits. He narrows it to "Chinese triads Shanghai," and the number is still something on the magnitude of science's best guess about the age of the earth, so he gives it up and concentrates on the act of jangling his central nervous system into some persuasive imitation of consciousness.
When he realizes he has reached the point of diminishing returns, he takes out the phone and punches in the number he had thought he would never dial.
"Poke." It is Ming Li, sounding cool and unsurprised as always.
"Is he there?"
"He's asleep."
"Wake him up."
"You're on your cell," she says. "Nothing worth waking him up for should be said on a cell. What time is it?"
"Eight-twenty. And it's important to you and important to me."
"Tell me where you are."
Why not? It's a little late to worry about any threat from Frank. He tells her.
"Twenty minutes," Ming Li says. Then she hangs up.
It's too early for his first planned stop of the day. The man he is going to see, whom he interviewed when he was in the first stages of researching his abandoned book, works seven days a week, but he won't be open for business until eleven or so. Since Rafferty's in front of a keyboard, he decides he'll take the most optimistic outlook: Everything will work out, and he still has to earn a living. He pulls his notebook from his pocket, opens Word, and begins to key in his notes about the spies.
He's surprised at how easily it comes. He transcribes a few words from the notebook, and then new impressions and new observations crowd in on him, and he weaves them into his notes. What had been the outline of a story begins to become the story itself, complete with the details that bring a place, a person, to life. Tired as he is, the words slip out with little resistance, and gradually the picture assembles itself, sentence by sentence, before his eyes. The trails these men took to come here, the peculiar mixture of openness and secrecy that characterizes their conversations, the eyes, different colors and different shapes, but always in motion.