The down escalators take Rafferty in easy stages to the basement, which is positively arctic. Housewives on the verge of hypothermia paw listlessly through piles of bargain clothes. At the far end of the sale area lurks an ersatz McDonald’s, complete with its own frightening clown. Beyond the bright plastic tables, their chairs bolted gaily to the floor, a set of tiled steps leads up to the sidewalk, and Rafferty takes them in two springs.
Hot air again. Hot pavement through the soles of his shoes. Traffic noise.
Lots of pretty women wearing bright colors. No White T-Shirt; he’s almost certainly watching the entrance. No Black Shirt. Red T-Shirt is probably flat on his back picking slivers of crockery from his hair.
Rafferty slows, debating the wisdom of turning the tables and grabbing one of them for a brief conversation. He is weighing the pros and cons as he makes a right into a side street and the little man with the black shirt and the clubfoot steps out of a doorway, smiles apologetically, levels a small black gun at Poke’s head, and shoots him square in the face.
2
From his perspective half a block away, where he appears to be entirely focused on choosing a spray of vaguely reptilian orchids from a sidewalk vendor, the fourth watcher-the
one the other three don’t know about-tracks the movements of the gun. He stiffens as the little man in the black shirt brings his hand up, takes a useless step forward as Rafferty stumbles back, watches open-mouthed as the trigger is pulled.
Not until he is walking away, his orchids tightly wrapped in newspaper, does he permit himself to laugh.
3
The first thing Peachy notices is that the man counting her money is perspiring very heavily, almost as heavily as a foreigner. Like many Thais, she finds it perplexing how much
farang sweat, although Peachy, who has persisted in regarding herself as a lady through a lifelong roller coaster of social ups and downs, would never use a word as common as “sweat.” During one of the brief periods of prosperity her family enjoyed when Peachy was growing up, they hired a British governess named Daphne. Almost forty years later, what Peachy remembers most vividly about Daphne is her hatred of the word “sweat.” “Horses sweat,” Daphne had said, sweating generously in the Bangkok summer. “Men perspire. Women glow.”
So the bank teller fumbling with the bills for her payroll is perspiring, in defiance of the glacial air-conditioning, which is cold enough to raise little stucco bumps on Peachy’s bare arms.
In fact, the teller’s shirt is so wet it’s transparent. Peachy has seen horses sweat less profusely, even after one of the races to which she used to be. . well, addicted. If there’s a more polite word for “sweat,” Peachy thinks, counting silently to herself as she watches the stack of thousand-baht bills grow, there should be a more polite word for “addicted” as well. “Habit” is a bit weak, considering that the horses cost Peachy practically everything she owned. She managed to hang on to her business only because a farang, an American, had handed her an irresistible, absolutely life-changing wad of money that she couldn’t refuse even though it came with a mandatory partner. Together, she and Rose, the partner by command, have rebuilt the business until they have actually begun to show a profit. But the horses had cost her dearly, had cost her much of what she had taken for granted in life, had cost her-
Had cost her, in fact, much more than she is prepared to think about now, especially when she should be watching this very nervous man count out her money.
The teller’s hands are shaking, too.
His eyes come up to Peachy’s and catch her regarding him. He smiles, or tries to smile. It looks like the smile of a man who wants to prove he can take bad news well. Cancer? No problem. The smile is impossible to return. Peachy begins to feel distinctly uneasy.
“Forgive me,” she says, leaning forward slightly and politely lowering her voice. “Are you feeling all right?”
The teller straightens as though someone has plugged his stool directly into a wall socket, and his eyes widen into an expanse of white with the irises marooned in the center. Peachy involuntarily thinks about fried eggs. “Me?” the teller asks, swallowing. “Fine, fine. And you?”
Peachy takes a discreet step back. The man smells of something, perhaps illness or even fear. “Fine, thank you.”
“It’s just. . you know,” the teller says, blinking rapidly. He makes a tremulous gesture at the stack of white-and-brown bills in front of him. “Lot of, um, um, money,” he says.
“We pay the girls today,” Peachy says, and then replays the sentence in her mind. “They’re housemaids,” she clarifies. “We run a domestic agency. Bangkok Domestics.” Although she’s grown fond of Rose, she still can’t bring herself to call it Peachy and Rose’s Domestics.
The teller tries to square the bills into a neat pile, but his hands aren’t steady enough, and he gives up and shoves them under the glass partition like a pile of leaves. “You must be doing well.”
“It’s getting better,” Peachy says. Although the bills all seem to be brand new, they look damp and a little bit sticky, as though they had been absorbing moisture in the perspiring man’s pocket. She doesn’t, she realizes, actually want to touch them. Below the counter she unsnaps her purse-Gucci, the first one she’s had in years that isn’t a street fake-and holds it wide. Then, using her expensive new fingernails and hoping she’s not being rude, she sweeps the money off the counter and into the purse. “Bye-bye,” she says in English, turning away.
The bank teller’s eyes follow her all the way across the lobby: a woman in her late forties, wearing clothes that could provoke buyer’s remorse in a seventeen-year-old. He resolutely refuses to look out through the picture window at the front of the bank, where he knows the man will be. Watching him.
He looks up to face his next customer.
4
Rose draws the usual quota of stares as she navigates the crowded sidewalk of Bangkok’s Pratunam district, threading her way between the stands of the sidewalk vendors.
She slows to take a closer look at a T-shirt with a picture of the plump, fuzzy forest spirit Totoro on it. As she looks at the shirt, other people look at her. Almost six feet tall and-as Rafferty insists-hurtfully beautiful, Rose has been conspicuous since she turned fourteen. She has grown used to it.
But she feels the gaze of the extremely pretty girl who is eyeing her from two stalls away. Women look at Rose almost as much as men do, although usually for different reasons, and not for four or five blocks. This girl, Rose is certain, has been tagging along behind her for at least ten minutes.
Someone she knew at the bar, perhaps? No, she’d remember. The girl is probably hasip-hasip, literally fifty-fifty, half Asian and half Caucasian. The only hasip-hasip girl in the bar where Rose danced, back in the bad old days, was half Thai and half black. Anyway, this girl is too young. It’s been a couple of years since Rose last took the stage at the King’s Castle in Patpong Road, and this girl can’t be more than seventeen.