"Warm it up in here," Arthit snaps at the waitress who greets them, holding menus of phone-book thickness. The Thai Room will take a slap at approximating any kind of cooking in the world, but their approach to the Thai food they cook for Thai patrons is more painstaking. "And bring me whatever you're cooking for them."
"They ordered a lot."
"Pick the two items you'd feel most comfortable serving to a high-ranking policeman who's in a bad mood."
The waitress blanches and retreats toward the kitchen, with a detour at the thermostat.
Rafferty grabs a chair from another table, and two of the women shift their own chairs so he can sit opposite the girl from the Office. She looks everywhere but at him.
He says, "What's your name?"
The girl doesn't answer.
"Her name is Wan," Fon says. "She's not happy to be here."
"You should be," Rafferty says to her. Wan is busy moving her utensils around, trying to improve on the arrangement, her mouth a stubborn line. The plate in front of her is empty. He turns to Nit. "How'd you get her here?"
Nit says, "I bought her out." Two of the women laugh.
"Where's Horner?" Rafferty asks.
Wan shakes her head.
"This man," Rafferty says, holding up the picture.
"I don't know him," Wan says in Thai.
Nit takes the utensils out of the girl's hand. "Everybody in the bar identified him."
"I don't know him," Wan says again. She tries to push her chair back, but it bumps the wall. "I go now."
From behind Rafferty, Arthit says, "Tell you what. You talk to us or I'll take you to the monkey house."
Wan says, "So?" But her eyes have widened at the words.
"Where's his hotel?" Rafferty asks.
She offers a shrug so packed with resentment that it reminds him of Miaow. "How would I know?"
"Why aren't you with him? Why are you working tonight?"
"It's my job," she says defiantly. "I work at the Office Bar."
"Wan," Rafferty says in Thai, "Howard is a killer."
"Don't know Howard," she says in English. "I go."
"My wife used to work in a bar. He tried to kill her."
She's shaking her head. "Don't know-"
"He killed a friend of hers. He killed at least five-"
"Why you no listen? Don't know Howard."
"His wife," Nit says, leaning in, "is one of my best friends. She's helped every girl at this table. Howard took her out into the Andaman-"
Nit breaks off because Wan has whipped her head around to face her at the word "Andaman."
Rafferty jumps on her. "Phuket. He was going to take you to Phuket. Wasn't he?"
The girl is shaking her head again, but the certainty in her face is softening.
"He took her-my wife, I mean-to the Andaman," Rafferty says mercilessly, "to Phuket. He told her he was going to marry her."
Wan says, "No," but the word has little behind it except breath.
"Phuket was the first stop," Rafferty says. "After that he promised her they were going to her village so he could meet her parents and he could-"
She says, "No, no, no."
"— so he could pay the dowry. But instead he took her out in a boat and tried to kill her with a knife."
Wan says, "Not Howard. Not Howard."
"Where is he?"
Her lower lip is moving as though she's going to say something, but she shakes her head and sits back. "Don't know."
"Where is he staying?"
She shakes her head again, and it's clear to Rafferty that she won't tell him.
"Is he coming to the Office later?"
A pause, then, "No."
"Why not?" No answer, and Rafferty stands, leaning on his knuckles on the tabletop. "Why aren't you with him? Why are you working tonight?"
"He… he doesn't want me."
"Why not?" He leans toward her. "Why not?"
Everyone in the restaurant is staring at them.
Nit says, "Poke." She puts a reassuring hand on the girl's shoulder. "Come on, little sister. It's not going to hurt anyone if you just tell us why he's not with you. Why he won't come to the bar tonight. And you know what? If we're wrong about him, you might help us get things right."
With no transition Wan bursts into tears, not genteel sobbing but big, openmouthed, gulping howls. She cups her face in her hands and then pulls them away and slams her forehead against the table, so hard that all the silverware jumps. She lifts her head to do it again, but Rafferty slips his hand in, palm up, in the spot her forehead hit. She stares down at his hand, and the sobs deepen. She says to Nit, although Rafferty can barely understand the words, "I have my period. He doesn't like it when-"
The restaurant door opens with a bang. Anand looks in, finds them, and says, "Something's happening. Patpong 1. Everybody's running."
Less than a minute later, having bulled his way through a dense crowd on the stub road with Arthit a step behind him, Rafferty enters the throng on Patpong 1 and sees hundreds of heads, all craning to see something to Rafferty's left. Rafferty, who is taller than most of the crowd, turns to look, and says to Arthit, "Holy Jesus Christ."
Chapter 29
He's walking in the center of a red whirlwind, a whirlwind of rage and self-loathing. His bandaged nose and mouth hurt, and he raises his right hand and slams it open-palmed against his nose, sending an electric burst of pain vaulting through the circuits of his nervous system. His eyes watering, he's about to do it again-God knows he deserves it-but he realizes that it will start his nose bleeding again.
He looks freakish enough already, without blood all over his chin and shirt.
It's about two minutes to ten. He's chosen to come into the area through the Silom end of Patpong 2, the first block of which is always dark. Sidewalk vendors, closed at that hour, own the first segment of the road, so there is no one to see him there. A go-go bar scatters its neon into the night on the right, but he keeps to the left, hands jammed into his pockets, shoulders rigid with fury. John had been right. They should have killed Rose and the others that first night, just minced them where they slept. But they'd seemed so harmless, the wispy little half-breed husband and that ugly brown kid. And he was busy setting up the last act with Wan, and he'd thought he could have his fun with her and then have a little more fun with Rose and that patched-together, pathetic little family.
After all, it was about fun. It had always been about fun.
It humiliates him that John had been right. The accomplice, the sidekick, the guy Howard had always thought of as Tonto-even called him Tonto out loud a few times, knowing that John wasn't aware that tonto was Spanish for "stupid." Well, Stupid had been right.
And where the hell is Stupid? Did the cops get him? If they did, then he and Stupid are both as good as dead unless he moves right now. Faced with a bunch of Thai uniformed muscle in a concrete room, John will talk. Ten minutes later Howard's passport will be radioactive. No legal way out of the country.
And then, just to make everything perfect, that idiot Wan got her period. The day before the flight to Phuket and the dance on the rocks, the bitch got the curse.
Mistake after mistake, piled on the lethal sin of underestimating the opposition. Letting that wuss writer slap him around in the street, jam the handle of his own knife up his nose. No, he and John couldn't just follow them from the kid's school, the way John had wanted to, and then kill them wherever they were hiding. (John was right again.) No, let's get the kid, he hears himself say. It'll paralyze Rose. She'll come to us on her hands and knees. We'll make her call the hubby and bring him to us, we'll make her open her own blouse to the knife, as long as she thinks the kid will come out of it okay.