Read A Nail Through the Heart Online
Authors: Timothy Hallinan
A Nail Through the Heart
A Novel of Bangkok
Timothy Hallinan
For Munyin. Again.
For the thousandth time in twelve weeks, the blue of the tsunami rises up—now safely contained behind the glass screen—and breaks to pieces on the trunks of the palms. At this point, as everyone in the world who has a television knows, the horizon tilts to a forty-five-degree angle. Then the camera moves back, herky-jerky to the rhythm of the cameraman’s steps, and another wave rushes forward to devour the one before it and shatter itself against a low wall, and the small figures resolve into running people, and for the first time you can hear the shouts and the occasional scream.
And around the camera now, as it turns to show us the single street of the village, awash with the detritus of deck chairs and plastic bags, more water surges ashore. You can no longer see the running people.
M
oon and river. House and trees.
The hard line of the roof lops the lower half from the rising moon. Across the river, the city of eight million shimmers like the ghost of a brushfire.
In the dark trees at the river’s edge, a rustle of birds. In the palm of Tam’s hand, the sudden spark-red pain of a splinter.
The shovel he has driven deep into the mud strikes something hard and stops. The laws of physics force Tam’s hands down the wet wooden handle and drive the sharp fragment a full inch into his lotioned and pampered palm.
It is a measure of the care Tam takes with his hands that his first thought is,
Thank God it’s the left,
giving him approximately one-fifth of a second of gratitude before the second thought lights up the night:
The safe
.
He straightens slowly against his aching back, hoping the water in the hole has muffled the sound of metal striking metal, but the man
above him, the man holding the flashlight in his one good hand, has seen Tam’s hands skid down the handle and bends forward and says, “Something?”
Tam wiggles the blade of the shovel. The surface, whatever it is, is smooth and slick, not a rock.
“A rock,” he says. Then he says, for the third time, “I hate this water.”
Not that hating it does any good. Even in a hole less than four feet deep, the water seeps in and saturates the dirt. It turns it into a sluggish, heavy soup, precisely the old red of dried blood, that slops over the sides of the shovel and splatters back down. And rises up from below: For every shovelful of mud Tam throws over the side, a pint of warm, muddy river water seeps into the bottom of the hole.
Bangkok is a river town, built around a network of canals radiating off the Chao Phraya, the silt-saturated River of Kings. The city’s office towers, roads, and palaces float queasily on a tropical flood-plain. Even in the dry season, the water is always there, pooled just beneath the dirt, just beneath the pavement. Waiting for some fool with a shovel.
But now the fool has struck gold. No, not gold. Jewels.
Tam leans on the shovel and gazes down into the hole to hide the elation in his face. There must be a way to get rid of the man above him for a minute. A minute is all it would take.
The moon has lifted its dappled face another fraction above the house: old Thai style, graceful angles of dark, heavy teak. Large and sprawling, it opens to grand verandas that gaze down across a sweep of grass to the river. In Bangkok only wealthy people have room for grass. They surround it with high concrete walls topped with shards of broken glass to keep people like Tam and the other man at bay. The house is unlighted. According to the other man—who says his name is Chon, although it is not—it is empty.
The emerging moon sharpens the house’s shadow across the lawn.
The empty house, the glass-topped wall, the jewels: Chon had known many things. Not until this moment, though, leaning on a shovel up to his hips in muddy water, with his palm bleeding, does
Tam actually believe that Chon knows the location of the most famous invisible jewels in Southeast Asia.
Okay, so maybe Tam can’t make Chon leave. Time is still on his side. If he can slop around in the hole for another forty minutes or so, they’ll have to fill it in, and then he can come back on his own. Chon has arranged for the watchman to disappear for only ninety minutes. When he made this point, Chon had pointed at the face of his heavy watch, gleaming in the moonlight above the ruined left hand with the crushed fingers on it.
The hand had made Tam think of a swatted spider the first time he saw it. The second time he looked at the hand, he noticed that three of the fingers had no nails. After that he stopped looking at it.
If Chon is right about what’s in the safe, Tam will never have to open another one.
“So who is she, this woman?” he asks as he slips the shovel aimlessly into the mud.
“A general’s widow.” Chon is bent forward, beaming the flashlight’s yellow cone straight down, trying to see through the reddish brown water that swirls around Tam’s legs. Looking for the straight lines, the edges of the safe, that will announce that the hole is in the right place.
“What time?” Tam asks, just to make Chon move the light.
“Twelve twenty-two,” Chon says, beaming the flashlight at the watch. “Jewels won’t be much deeper.” Is there a note of suspicion in his voice?
The jewels.
Like a magic spell, the words ease the pain in Tam’s back. Even his palm stops hurting. In 1987 a Thai servant, returning home after a long period of service to the Saudi royal family, brought with him a suitcase full of jewels that belonged to the princess he worked for. Prodded by the Saudis, the Bangkok police arrested the servant and held a press conference to let the jewels dazzle the cameras. After an unexplained delay of several months, the jewels were shipped back to Saudi Arabia, where they were promptly pronounced to be fakes.
The entire population of Thailand immediately concluded that
the police had commissioned the manufacture of the fakes so they could either sell the real articles or give them to their wives. Since then the Saudi jewels have been the object of feverish speculation among Bangkok’s jewel thieves. So when Chon told his story in the jail cell where he and Tam met, Tam’s interest was fully engaged. A lifetime of relative virtue, he thought, was finally being rewarded. A policy of nonviolence. Stealing only from the rich. Gifts to monks. Pleasantries to his in-laws. His wife, the great treasure of his life, would be so happy.
“I thought you said she was a policeman’s widow,” Tam says at last, sluicing mud over the side of the hole.
Chon wiggles the flashlight back and forth, a negative. “Who cares? Just dig. Once you hit the safe, we have to pull it out, open it, put it back—”
“Yeah, yeah.” The shovel slices through the water and probes soft mud, a good foot from the safe. Tam steps off the shovel carefully, lifts it, and dumps a streaming load of mud over the side of the hole. “How are we going to clean up all this mud?” he asks, keeping his voice light.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chon says.
“I wasted five minutes cutting out that square of lawn to hide the hole. What good is that going to do if the lawn is covered in mud?”
“I said don’t worry about it.”
“Right. You’re not digging.” Tam slides the edge of the shovel through the mud. The safe seems to be about eighteen inches long. “How big is this thing?”
“It’s a cube,” Chon says grudgingly. “About two feet on a side.”
Tam has located the corner of the safe. Turning his back to Chon to mask his actions, he slips the shovel down along its side and uses the handle as a lever to worry the safe free of the mud’s grasp. It gives a few inches, and Tam wiggles the shovel around to scoop up some of the mud, which he tosses over the edge of the hole.
“About the mud on the lawn,” he says. “You didn’t answer me about the mud. Look at it, it’s everywhere.”
“Oh, fuck the mud with your grandfather’s dick,” Chon says. “I’m
going to hose it into the hole. The guard’s getting paid, but there’s no point in leaving a mess that he’d have to be dead to miss, is there? You want the cops asking him questions and knocking him around, or you want some time to sell the jewels right instead of throwing them away for a few baht just to get rid of them fast?”
“Maybe we’re digging in the wrong place.” Tam does not dare to pry the safe loose, so he drops his shoulders and strains again, filling the shovel for what seems like the thousandth time. The splinter drives a nail of pain into his palm.
“Another six inches or so,” Chon says. Then his expression changes. Something reserved and watchful comes into his face. “I’ll dig.”
“But your hand—”
“Don’t worry about my hand,” Chon snaps, watching him closely. “I’ll dig.”
“Forget it,” Tam says, giving up. “I can manage another six inches.”
Chon looks at his watch as ten pounds of mud land next to his shoes. “Manage it faster,” he says.
“Another six inches,” Tam repeats. “Not very deep.”
“You want it to be deeper?”
“Just, you know, to protect these jewels—”
“She’s not depending on the safe to protect the jewels,” Chon says. “She’s depending on being the scariest fucking woman in the world.”
“She’s
what
?” Tam asks.
“Hmmm?” Chon’s eyes come up from the hole to meet Tam’s. He looks surprised at the expression on Tam’s face. “I meant him, not her. When he was alive. Very scary guy.”
Tam continues to look at him. Chon looks up at the trees.
“Listen,” Tam finally says, “when I find this thing, I’m going to need my stethoscope. In my jacket.” He gestures toward the dark shape on the lawn. “In the left pocket.”
After a moment Chon grunts and goes to pick up the jacket. He pats it and makes a little inquiring sound. “What have you got?”
“A can,” Chon says. “With a little…ah, something like a straw, coming out of it.”
“That’s good, too.” Tam puts his hand out without looking, and Chon plops the can into it. “And the stethoscope.”
Chon gives the jacket an impatient shake and flips it upside down. He says something sharp-sounding in a language Tam does not understand and then says, “There’s nothing else in the jacket.”
“A stethoscope,” Tam says. “It’s got two earpieces—”
“I know what a stethoscope is,” Chon says. “I have a heart and a doctor, same as you.”
Tam does not look up. “Then it’s in the boat.”
Chon processes this for a moment and looks back down into the hole. “You get it.”
“Don’t be silly. I can dig while you’re gone. What can you do while I’m gone? Walk up and down? Wave the flashlight around? You said it wouldn’t be much deeper.”
Chon watches him for a moment and then turns off the flashlight and jogs off toward the boat.
Immediately Tam squats into the warm water, which comes up almost to his chin, and slides his hands around the edges of the safe to free it. Then he slips his arms under it and lifts.
At first he thinks it won’t come. The mud sucks at it, and Tam curses quietly and works his arms back and forth in the mud, trying to break the vacuum, hitting his precious fingers on stones and roots and something sharp that cuts into the back of his hand.
He knows he is bleeding, but something pleasantly tight has begun to build in his chest, and he can almost feel heat coming from the safe, flowing into his arms and giving him the strength he needs. With a deep grunt, he pulls the safe free of the mud’s grasp and straightens, standing in the hole with a dark cube in his arms, streaming water and mud.
A sound like crumpling paper as the birds desert the trees overhanging the river. Chon must be at the dock.
Moving quickly now, Tam slips the safe over the edge of the hole and examines it.
He sees a black plastic bag tightly knotted over a cube. He tears it open to reveal thin steel, irregularly scratched, dented, and pocked
with rust. A long crimp creases the top where his shovel hit it, and rust reddens the hinges of the door. It looks cheap, and he is vaguely disappointed; he had been looking forward to a challenge.
No time now. Pulling a slender penlight from his pocket and cupping a hand around it to shield the light from Chon’s view, he takes a quick look at the combination dial.
Junk
, he thinks. He picks up the aerosol can, shakes it twice, and places the tip of the thin tube that comes out of the can’s top against the edge of the dial, where twelve would be on a clock. He pushes the button on the can, and it emits a sharp hiss. Tam pushes the button three more times, placing the thin tube at three, six, and nine. Then he puts down the can, picks up the shovel, and taps the end of the handle against the dial three or four times, hard.
“Mai
,” he says. It is his wife’s name and the only prayer he ever uses. Suppressing the shaking that has seized control of his fingers, he turns the tumblers.
Within fifteen seconds he has the safe open. He risks a glance over his shoulder: no Chon. He reaches into the safe.
And finds nothing.
He has expected a soft bag with the stones inside it, or perhaps the jewels themselves, loose as pirate’s treasure, sparkling in the moonlight. There is nothing.
No. There is a plastic bag, flat as cardboard, with a knot tied in the top. He tears it open, hurrying now, and finds an envelope.
Tam pulls it out, laying it flat at the edge of the hole. The envelope is rigid manila with bruised edges, the size of a large piece of paper. Its flap is secured by a piece of twine twisted many times around a clasp. It takes Tam almost as long to open the envelope as it took him to open the safe. The papers in the envelope are slick and cold and stiff beneath his fingers, and he knows what they are even before he pulls them out. Photographs.
The top sheet has eight small pictures on it, each framing a person’s face. All but one of them are male. They seem to be in their late twenties and early thirties. They stare unsmiling from the page, dark-skinned and wearing identical dark shirts and caps, standing in front
of a bare wall. The lone woman is extraordinarily thin, with sharp features and the enormous, lustrous eyes of a starvation victim, but she does not look like a victim. She has the face of someone who chewed her way out of the womb.
Eight small pictures fill each of the other three sheets as well. These are not faces, though. In these pictures, taken from farther away, people bend forward, focused, doing something. Work of some kind. The photos are small, and the moonlight is not bright enough for Tam to make out what is being done. He aims the penlight at them and pushes the button.
His blood shrieks in his ears.
“You shouldn’t have looked,” Chon says behind him.
Tam wants to turn, wants to face Chon, but he cannot.
He sees what the people are doing in the photographs, sees it but does not believe it, and sees it again. Believes it. His eyes slam shut.
“I
am
sorry about this,” Chon says sadly. Tam turns to catch a quick glimpse of the man. A silvery edge of moonlight gleams on the thing in his hand, and then Tam hears a muffled little sound like a cough, and something punches him very hard in the chest, dead center, and his knees go loose beneath him. He tries to grab the side of the hole, but his hands—his trained, sensitive, responsive hands—won’t do what he wants them to, and he feels himself start to fall very slowly as the light shines into the hole, and he sees Mai’s face looking up at him, and she smiles the way she always does when she sees him, and he realizes it is his own face, reflected in the water. He starts to say her name again. And then his head hits the water and he is gone.