A Nail Through the Heart (15 page)

I
n his entire life, Rafferty has never met anyone who hates shopping for clothes more than he does.

Until now.

The boy barely allows himself to be dragged from store to store. The sullen face has returned, accompanied by a stubborn silence. He seems completely indifferent to the clothing Rafferty suggests, and he nods assent only when the shirt being considered is blue.

“You really are being a pain in the ass,” Rafferty says in English as the third shirt is bagged. The saleswoman looks at him, startled. “Not you,” Rafferty says. “Junior here.”

“Boys,” the saleswoman says with the ancient wisdom of her sex. “Boys no like clothes.”

“I know I didn’t,” Rafferty says.

“Your son?” the saleswoman asks. Rafferty is surprised by how fast the boy’s eyes come up to his face.

“Sort of.” The boy’s eyes slip away.

“Handsome boy,” she says, handing him the bag.

“He’s handsome when he smiles,” Rafferty says. “He smiles on Tuesdays.” He gives the bag to Superman. “Come on, handsome.”

On the escalator down, he turns to the boy and says, in Thai, “Enough for one day?”

The boy looks away. Then he nods.

“Enough for me, too. I hate to shop.”

The boy says, “But—” and then thinks better of it.

“Look, it’s dark outside,” Rafferty says, gesturing toward the department store’s street-level picture window. Cars with their headlights on dawdle on the boulevard, waiting for the light to change. It seems to be drizzling. “You want something to eat?”

A shake of the head. The boy’s eyes are everywhere except on Rafferty.

“Well, fine,” Rafferty says, suppressing a surge of irritation. “We’ll go home, sit around, and chat some more.”

A fine mist is falling, crowding the pedestrians on the sidewalk up against the buildings. Rafferty heads for the less sparsely populated curb so they can walk faster. The boy follows silently in his wake. Within a minute they are both wet.

Rafferty stops and puts out a hand. The boy looks at it and then slowly gives him the bag with the new shirts in it, as though he does not expect to get it back. Rafferty folds it over and hands it back. “Let’s keep them dry,” he says. The boy nods grudgingly and tucks the folded bag beneath his arm.

A scuffling sound behind him, and something hits Rafferty in the back, low down and hard. His knees buckle. His attention is devoted to the effort to stay on his feet when he sees a boy, a little bigger than Superman, snatch the bag and take off. Superman is after him in an instant. Rafferty follows in their wake, chasing children for the second time in four days.

The running boys turn into a narrow unlighted
soi,
one Rafferty has not explored. There is a corner five or ten yards up, and the boys round it to the right. There is a sudden grunt—Superman?—and Rafferty accelerates around the corner.

They are on him at once.

Several pairs of hands grab him and pull him further up the
soi,
away from the lights and crowds of Silom. He kicks out at one of them, and hands grasp the upraised leg and hoist it skyward, and then the other leg is seized and he is grasped beneath the arms. They carry him, kicking and struggling, into the darkness. Someone slams a fist against the side of his head, and Rafferty sees an interesting pattern of lights, and then the fist lands again, more heavily this time, and it also strikes the arm supporting his left shoulder, and the arm releases him, and he begins to fall.

Four of them,
he thinks before he hits the pavement. Through the legs surrounding him, he sees a blue streak: Superman running out of the
soi,
the recovered shopping bag flapping behind him.

They begin to kick him.

They kick his ribs, his hips, his legs, working methodically and deliberately. There seems to be no anger in it, but they’re putting their backs into it. He can hear them grunt with the effort. One man lifts a heavy shoe and tries to grind it down onto Rafferty’s face, but Rafferty grabs it and twists it, and the man goes down, and Rafferty rolls through the empty space the man vacated and scrambles shakily to his feet. All four are in front of him. His head is spinning and his legs are rubber, but he backs quickly away until his back comes to rest against a wall. Without a word the men form a semicircle, cutting off access to Silom, and one of them, the one farthest to the right, reaches into his back pocket and comes out with a sock. The toe, filled with sand or buckshot, bulges heavily.

Not more than a minute has passed. No one has spoken a word. Panting, Rafferty searches their faces: not Arthit’s renegade cops.

Two men feint to Rafferty’s left, and as he turns to meet them the sock whistles past his ear and hits his right shoulder with the weight of a falling safe. His right side goes numb and he sags, knowing with the instinctive wisdom of bone and muscle that one more of those will finish him. As the men come at him from the right, he shifts his weight, leans against the wall, and plants a foot squarely between the legs of the shortest and nearest of them. The sap streaks down again,
and Rafferty twists away, feeling the wind from the sap against his face as the short man he kicked drops, gasping, to the concrete.

It is important to keep the wall at his back. Everything he knows in the world has come down to this. It is important to keep the wall at his back.

The downed man is vomiting, knees curled against his chest. The one he had been paired with feints again on Rafferty’s left, but this time Rafferty absorbs the punch, moving away to soften the impact and turning to try to intercept the sap. It lands on his forearm with a detonation of pain that threatens broken bones, and the man steps back and raises it again. Rafferty knows he cannot lift his right arm. The other men are coming in on him.

A blur at the corner of his vision. Before Rafferty can even question it, it turns into the boy, hanging with both hands onto the arm with the upraised sap, sinking his teeth through the shirt and into the muscle of the shoulder. The man with the sap grunts in surprise and then screams hoarsely as the boy’s teeth break the skin and invade the muscle and bones beneath. He flails wildly, staggering back and trying to shake the boy loose, but every move he makes increases the depth of the boy’s bite.

The other two men are staring in disbelief as Rafferty cups his left hand and brings the palm up with all his strength beneath the nose of the one nearest him, trying to drive the cartilage all the way back into the brain. The man makes a strangled, snuffling sound and staggers back, and Rafferty goes for the fourth man’s eyes.

The man is ready for him. He brings his fist down on Rafferty’s right shoulder, where the sap hit it, and Rafferty goes to his knees in a shallow puddle of water. The man above him draws back his leg for a kick, and Superman is suddenly clinging to it, pulling it back, bringing the man down facefirst. Rafferty rolls and snaps an elbow into the man’s ear with all his remaining strength, and the man’s head rolls around loosely. Suddenly Rafferty remembers the gun beneath his shirt, and he starts to reach for it.

“That’s enough,” a voice says in Thai.

Rafferty looks up to see the shortest of the men, the one he kicked.
He has an automatic in his hand, pointed at Rafferty’s head. His other hand cups his testicles.

The man with the sap helps up the one Rafferty just elbow-punched. He seems only half conscious, his head hanging forward and his eyes unfocused. The one whom Rafferty tried to kill with the blow to the nose is bleeding heavily down his shirt and pants. Superman is sprawled on the concrete, facedown.

The man with the gun steps forward toward Rafferty, jacks a shell into the chamber, and touches the gun to Rafferty’s temple. “Stop,” he says. “Don’t ask any more questions.”

“About what?” Rafferty asks. The tip of the gun is unbelievably cold against his skin, so cold it seems to suck his body heat into it. “Are we talking about Madame Wing or—”

“That’s the message,” the short man says. “Don’t ask any more questions.” And he pulls back the gun and slams Rafferty squarely on the forehead with it.

The
soi
tilts and darkens, and Rafferty feels his head strike the pavement. He doesn’t think he has lost consciousness, but the next thing he knows, he is staring down at wet concrete from a height of one or two inches. He puts his hands under him and pushes up, but they slide apart on the slick surface, skittering away from him, and he drops back onto the pavement. He changes strategy and gets his elbows against the pavement, forearms flat, and levers himself up to a sitting position.

The men are gone. Superman is several yards away, still facedown. He has not moved.

“Hey,” Rafferty says, and then realizes he has not said it aloud. He clears his throat, swallows, and says, “Hey,” again.

The boy is motionless.

Slowly, Rafferty rolls onto his hands and knees, trying not to move his head too quickly. His right arm will barely take his weight. Favoring the left, he crawls to the boy’s side and puts two fingers against his throat, where a pulse should be.

The boy groans ands turns over slowly, his eyes open. He has blood on his chin and neck, and his forehead has been scraped raw
against the pavement. He takes in the damage to Rafferty’s face and looks directly into his eyes. Then, very deliberately, he smiles. It is a wolf’s grin.

“No police on Silom,” he says. There is blood on his teeth.

Rafferty finds himself smiling back. “We don’t need any stinking police.”

Simultaneously, the two of them begin to laugh.

Bleeding, laughing, and leaning against each other for support, they stagger toward home.

N
o more questions about
what
?” Arthit asks.

“Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it?” Rafferty moves the ice pack from his shoulder to the forearm the sap hit, which sports a swelling the size of a softball. “What am I being warned off of? I lit a lot of fuses in the past few days.”

“Maybe you’re complicating it,” Arthit says. He leans forward to examine the swelling on Rafferty’s arm. “Maybe it’s only one story. Occam’s razor and all.”

They sit side by side on the couch in Rafferty’s living room. Miaow is in her room with the door closed, nursing Superman, who retreated rapidly at the sight of Arthit’s uniform. Rose bangs around in the kitchen, unbagging the ice she ran down to buy the moment she set eyes on Rafferty and the boy. She also sweet-talked a druggist out of some prescription painkillers, two of which are beginning to remap Rafferty’s nervous system

Her alarm at his injuries was obscurely rewarding, almost worth
the pain. Unfortunately, it was immediately followed by anger at his having put himself—and, by extension, all of them—at risk.

He closes his eyes to indulge a pleasant wave of wooziness. The couch undulates slightly. “I don’t think it’s one story, Arthit. Occam or not. I think that what happened between Doughnut and Uncle Claus is personal, just between the two of them. It’s obviously not about money. She left behind fifty thousand dollars in watches alone. Nothing got stolen until Doughnut went back yesterday and bagged the software, if it was software. Whatever is going on with Madame Wing, it’s something else. There’s money involved, and it’s something Cambodian.”

“Swelling’s going down nicely,” Arthit says untruthfully. “Do you suppose someone could put some of that ice into a glass of Mekhong?”

“We don’t have any. How about a beer?”

“What kind?”

“What have you got? Heineken?”

“Singha,” Rose says from the kitchen, to let them know she is listening.

“How about a Singha?” Arthit says.

Rose looks up from the ice she is pounding. “One?” It verges on a dare.

“Two,” Rafferty says.

A beat. “You shouldn’t drink beer with that pain medication.”

“Beer
is
a pain medication.”

“I know cats with more sense than most men,” Rose says. She throws open the refrigerator door, letting it whack the counter.

“So here’s what I think, Arthit.” Rafferty tries to get comfortable and fails. Even with the pills distributing millions of tiny pillows throughout his nervous system, a clenched fist slams the inside of his head every time his heart beats. “I went looking for Doughnut at Madame Wing’s, and she hired me to find out about something else.”

“I suppose,” Arthit says, sounding unconvinced. “Four of them, you say?”

“With a sap and a gun. No match for me and the kid.”

“And you’ve never seen any of them before.”

“Well, they’re not your two cops.” He has told Arthit about the visit that afternoon. “They’re just muscle. They didn’t know anything besides what they said: ‘Don’t ask any more questions.’ They were there to scare me, not kill me.”

“This
time,” Rose says as she comes out of the kitchen with the Singha. The glance she gives Rafferty as she hands his to him is icier than the beer.

The beer is so cold it’s thickening in the glass. The chill makes Rafferty’s sinuses ache, and the fat, skunky fragrance fills his nostrils as he swallows. He feels better immediately. “What about my Cambodian?” he asks.

Arthit looks over at Rose, who is pretending not to listen, and lowers his voice. “You going to go on with this?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says.

“I don’t know, Poke.”

“Well, I do. I can use that money. Miaow and I—”

“Obviously,” Arthit says, “but it won’t do her much good if you’re dead.”

“Everybody underestimates me.” Rafferty takes another pull at his beer to accelerate the healing process. “It’s my secret weapon.”

“Up to you,” Arthit says in the tone of someone who realizes that rational argument is not an option. “There was only one Cambodian in the cell.” He reaches into his tattered leather briefcase and takes out a sheaf of papers, fastened with a clip. “Chouk Ran. Age fifty-one. Here legally. No prior arrests. Five feet seven, dark complexion, left hand badly mangled. Missing fingernails. He was staying in a flophouse when he was arrested.”

“For what?”

“Shoplifting at Foodland. Put up a fuss when he got caught, so they called the cops.”

“Shoplifting at
Foodland
?” Rafferty asks. “Come on. I know people who have been caught there. You give it back and slip the manager five hundred baht. They say thank you and good night. It’s probably a line item in their spreadsheets.”

“He wouldn’t play. Had plenty of money in his pocket, too.”

“What’d he take?”

Arthit grins. “An electric mixer. One of those things for cakes. In a box, no less.”

“Not exactly something you can slip under a T-shirt. He just try to walk out with it?”

“Big as life.”

“My, my,” Rafferty says. “Either he really, really wanted to bake a cake or he wanted to go to jail.”

“Good place to meet crooks,” Arthit says.

Rafferty moves his head slowly from side to side and notices a novel blurring in the center of his vision as the room slides by. Pharmaceutical special effects. “Got a picture?”

“Of course.” Arthit folds back the top sheet to show Rafferty a photocopy of a mug shot. The man has a dark shock of hair, stiff as a whiskbroom, that seems to grow sideways on his head; a straight, strong mouth; and the eyes of someone who has seen considerably more than he was prepared to see. He stares at the camera as though it were a gun pointed at his head.

“Not one of the guys in the alley,” Rafferty says. The photo swims a little bit in front of him.

“Too much to hope for.” Arthit hands the papers to Rafferty. “I have no idea where you got these.”

“If you were this guy, Arthit, where would you be?”

“It depends on what he’s doing,” Arthit says. “But if what Madame Wing said is true, I’d bet he won’t get too far from her.”

“I don’t think he’ll get too close either,” Rafferty says. He holds Arthit’s gaze. “You haven’t met Madame Wing.”

THE SIZZLER, WHICH
Superman chose since the meal is in his honor, is part of a little snarl of vehemently American fast-food mills on Silom that includes a Pizza Hut and a McDonald’s. The boy wears one of his new shirts, the front geometrically adorned with a rectangle of creases where it was folded around the department-store stiffener.
He keeps sharpening the creases between thumb and forefinger, and Rafferty realizes it is probably the first new prefolded shirt he has ever worn. The scrape over his eye has turned into a broad calligraphy brushstroke of brown.

He looks very happy.

He eats two sirloin steaks, barely chewing. His glance keeps floating up from the carnage on his plate to Rafferty. Miaow watches him eat with openmouthed admiration, as though he had personally materialized the food before eating it.

Arthit has abandoned them, gone home to Noi.

“I’m going to walk back,” Rafferty says when they hit the pavement. It is almost nine o’clock, and the vendors are crowding the sidewalk across the street.

“We’ll all walk,” Rose says. She has thawed some during dinner.

“No, Rose, if you don’t mind.” The children are not exactly appropriate to this particular errand. “I’m going to take my time, work out some of this stiffness. And I have some thinking to do.” He reaches across them and punches Superman lightly on the shoulder. The boy’s eyes go wide, and then he grins and feints a punch back. “Thanks again,” Rafferty says.

When Rose and the children are half a block away, he crosses Silom. It seems to take a long time, and he recognizes that the pills are still at work. Walking a bit more deliberately than usual, he shoulders his way into the throng moving slowly in the narrow corridor between the rows of stalls. Watches, clothes, wood carvings, bootleg compact discs and audiotapes, hill-tribe artifacts, fake antiques, and silver jewelry gleam in the overhead spotlights.

The dark spaces are what he wants. Without Arthit’s guidance he would have walked right past them and not given them a glance.

Dim little pools among the brightness. Just a card table with a man sitting behind it. On each card table are five or ten of the bright plastic albums that drugstores put snapshots in.

Rafferty stops at the first of the booths.

“Sit,” the man says, pushing an overturned yellow plastic bucket toward him.

“Japanese,” Rafferty says, and the man selects a stack of albums and shoves it across the table. Rafferty flips it open.

It is full of glossy color photos, five inches by seven, slipped into transparent sleeves just like pictures from a family holiday. Each photo is the neatly trimmed cover of a video box. Schoolgirls—or, rather, young women dressed in the Japanese schoolgirl uniform—peer up at him in improbably suggestive poses. Beaming girls wearing strategically positioned suds advertise videos set in “soaplands,” the anything-goes Japanese version of the massage parlor. Close-ups of fresh-scrubbed faces promote the newest stars, most of whom look as though they’ve lived their entire lives on cotton candy and never uttered a nasty word. A year from now, these innocents will be dancing at Tokyo strip clubs that offer blow jobs in a little booth at the rear.

The second and third albums offer more of the same. “Anything special?” Rafferty asks.

The man counts down two or three more albums and pulls one out. Women with women, women with animals, women in the bathroom. Rafferty races through them in self-defense, but two pictures make him stop. Both feature women who have been tied up and handcuffed. He shows them to the man behind the table. “More?”

The man glances at the photos, and his mouth turns down. “Not have.”

“Do you know this man?” Rafferty asks, showing him the photograph of Claus Ulrich. He gets a quick glance and a shake of the head.

“Thanks for the use of the bucket,” Rafferty says, getting up. Too quickly: there is a little pop in his head and a sudden brightening of his vision. He has to put out a hand to remain upright.

By the time he has hit three stalls, Rafferty has learned to stand more slowly. He has also developed an unaffectionate appreciation for the sheer volume and variety of Japanese porn. The fourth booth is presided over by an imperious-looking woman in her early thirties wearing a great many silver bracelets. She is doing business as fast as she can; Rafferty has to wait for an unoccupied bucket.

“Japanese,” he says, and as a shortcut he adds, “special.”

“No problem.” She reaches under the table and brings out a stack of albums almost a foot high. The bracelets jingle gaily. “Have everything,” she says proudly.

And she does.

If asked, Rafferty would have said he had led a reasonably active and varied sex life, but what he sees when he opens the first album makes him feel twelve years old. Vegetables? Dead fish? Panty hose? Diapers? There seems to be nothing that is not the object of a fetish for someone.

He recognizes the first picture in the third album as the cover of one of the videos in Uncle Claus’s secret drawer. Paging rapidly through the blur of four-color torment, spotting several more, Rafferty becomes keenly aware of all the people behind him. This is not how he wishes to be remembered. He hunches more closely over the album, realizes that it probably just makes him look even more furtive, and straightens up once more.

He closes the last album and pushes the stack back toward the woman, who gives him a disappointed look. “Have something more special,” she says, and starts to reach beneath the table again. Rafferty brings up both hands, palms out. Whatever it might be that is “more special,” he will fight not to see it. He pulls the photo of Uncle Claus from his pocket and shows it to her, and she gives him a big smile.

“
Khun
Claus,” she says happily. “Number one customer. Every week four, five video.”

Good Lord, a footprint. Rafferty switches to Thai. “How long has it been since you saw him?”

She gazes up at the phone wires, packed as always with a species of small birds that are distinguished by their extremely active lower digestive tracts. “Three months?” she asks thoughtfully. “Four?”

“Does that happen often? That you don’t see him for so long?”

“
Khun
Claus travels,” she says a bit grandly. “He lives in the world.” She makes a gesture that is intended to sweep aside the borders of Thailand. “He comes, he goes.”

“Well, thanks.” Rafferty stands up, eager to get away from the table and everything on it.

“Three months,” the woman says. Her eyes widen. “Do you think he was down there?”

“I doubt it.” He starts to turn away, then thinks of one more question. “Did he ever buy other kinds of videos from you?”

She nods, eager to help. “Same kind.” Then she motions him closer, and Rafferty leans in reluctantly, putting a hand out for balance. With this woman’s standards, he does not want to hear anything she thinks needs to be whispered. She extends her hands to suggest handcuffs and says, “Sometimes boys.”

THAT NIGHT RAFFERTY
sits shirtless at his desk, icing his shoulder and drawing with a soft pencil on a drafting pad. The green-shaded student lamp on the desk is the only light in the room. The boy is asleep on the couch, his mouth open. He has, Rafferty notices, very good teeth.

A long time ago, he started to think of the books he wrote in terms of floor plans, working with pencil and eraser to explore the shape and balance of the manuscript without the distraction of words. Now he draws a floor plan of the mess he has gotten into, trying to create a geography of the situation.

The front door of his floor plan is opened by Arthit, who directs him to Clarissa. A line joins both of them to the two rogue cops. Clarissa points him down a hallway to the rooms that represent Uncle Claus, rooms that were furnished with secrets and violent pornography but are abandoned now. A short corridor leads him to Doughnut’s room, scoured clean and locked tight, linked by two lines, the first leading downstairs to Noot, working for Mr. Choy, and the other pointing toward a box for Bangkok Domestics. Bangkok Domestics is connected to the dark, gothic complex inhabited by Madame Wing, from which two lines run, one leading to the dead safecracker Tam and the other toward a mutilated Cambodian named Chouk Ran.