A Nail Through the Heart (25 page)

I
n the bland light of a restaurant, Toadface and Skeletor look more like regular cops and less like something that escaped from one of Raskolnikov’s nightmares. They even have nicknames: Toadface is Chut and Skeletor, for some reason, calls himself Nick.

“Khmer Rouge,” Chut says without enthusiasm. Nick, in defiance of the no-smoking ban recently imposed in Bangkok restaurants, lights his second cigarette in five minutes. Rafferty doesn’t like the smoke, but at least it keeps the man’s hands above the table.

“
Big-time
Khmer Rouge,” Rafferty says. “Should be worth a lot.”

Nick snorts a stream of smoke, nicotine disdain, and Chut says, “Shows what you know.”

Rafferty feels a surge of homicidal anger and waits it out. “Okay, well, you guys are the experts. But a lot of people would like to see her dead.”

“That doesn’t make them millionaires.” Chut looks down at
Nick’s pack of cigarettes and pushes it halfway across the table and out of reach, and Nick speaks the second word Rafferty has heard him utter. He says, “Hey.”

“So get a pool together. Everybody chips in. Show some fucking creativity.”

Chut puts two hands on the tablecloth and, with some difficulty, laces his fat little fingers together. “And you think this lets you off the hook.”

“What I think is that Clarissa brought about six thousand to Bangkok and you guys got more than half of that. She’s been living here ever since—what? About ten days? Figure it out. She’s got maybe fifteen hundred dollars left. I’m offering you this person on a silver platter. Should be worth ten times that.”

“What’s her name?”

Rafferty waits until the waitress puts two bowls of rice and some fish in front of Chut and Nick and a couple of scrambled eggs in front of him. He continues to wait until she has returned to pour coffee for him and Chut. Nick is drinking something that looks a lot like a tequila sunrise.

“You get the name, plus the address and a floor plan of the house, when we have a deal,” Rafferty says. “You
can
find customers?”

Chut says something with his mouth full. Rafferty can’t catch the words, but the gist seems to be “piece of cake.” The man swallows, and says, “Just for the hell of it, what’s the deal?”

Rafferty takes a deep breath. This is not a position he ever expected to be in. “One: She gets sold to someone who wants her dead. Two: Your problem with me is over. Three: I get one-fifth of whatever you sell her for.” He has a use in mind for the money, especially since Madame Wing won’t be making her second payment.

Nick laughs. It starts out like a snake’s hiss and turns into a cough. Chut says, “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.”

“I got off on the wrong foot with you guys,” Rafferty says. “Not my fault, not your fault. I’m just trying to make it right.”

“And pocket a little money.” Chut picks up his bowl in both hands and drains whatever liquid was at the bottom. “One-seventh,”
he says. Rafferty pushes back his chair and starts to rise. “Okay, okay. One-fifth.”

“Done.” He sits again, gives them Keck’s address, and describes the layout of the house and grounds. Then he hands over a plan of the first floor, drawn from memory. The thin one, Nick, listens with his eyes closed, his upper lip grasped between his teeth. Chut takes notes in an elegantly leather-bound booklet. Rafferty finishes and waits for questions.

When one comes, it comes from Nick. “How do you know you can trust us for the money?”

“Oh, please,” Rafferty says, getting up again. “You’re Bangkok’s finest.”

ON THE SIDEWALK
in front of the restaurant, he watches until the two of them are out of sight, trying to rationalize away the uneasiness he feels about having ordered someone’s death as casually as if it had been on the menu. When he turns, he bumps against someone. Looking down, he sees the dark little man from the
soi,
the one who had hit him with the gun. Behind him are his three teammates. One of them—the man whose nose Rafferty tried to drive into his brain—is wearing a raccoon’s mask that resolves itself into two black eyes that look borrowed from a cartoon. A long swelling, big enough to hide a baguette in, runs across his forehead, just above the eyebrows.

“Someone needs to talk to you,” the little man says. His right hand disappears into a small leather tote bag, secured by a shoulder strap. Protruding an inch or two from a hole cut into the side of the bag, a few inches from Rafferty’s belly, is the barrel of a gun.

Rafferty says, “It took her long enough.”

T
he fragrance of the flowers is so overpowering, Rafferty thinks, that it ought to tint the air—perhaps salmon, with halos of pink around the naked bulbs dangling from the bare electrical cords high overhead. The perfume seems thick enough to foam around his feet as he pushes his way through it, with two of the men in front of him and two behind.

There are obviously people here and there, but none in sight. The rows of flowers are too high, the aisles between them too narrow. He can hear voices occasionally, the energetic back-and-forth of bargaining, frequent bursts of laughter.

The five of them stop in front of a volcano of orchids taller than Rafferty. The small dark man, who has been directly behind Rafferty, steps forward and puts out a hand. He looks almost apologetic.

“Skip it,” Rafferty says.

“Those are the rules.”

“Make new ones.”

The man takes the gun from his bag, shows it to Rafferty, then
drops it back in and zips the bag tightly shut. He walks several yards away and places the bag on a display table beneath a spray of exotic flowers that look like they evolved to snatch bats in midflight. Then he comes back and raises his arms to shoulder height, inviting Rafferty to pat him down. “Do you want to check us? Lift your shirts,” he says to the others.

“Skip it. So I can see you haven’t got guns? You’ll have one when I give you mine, won’t you?”

“Look around,” the small man says. “This is a public place. Everybody in Bangkok who wants flowers is here.”

“Compromise,” Rafferty says. He slides the automatic free of his trousers, pops the clip, and hands the clip to the small dark man. Holding the gun between thumb and forefinger, he lets it dangle harmlessly in the air. “That’s the only clip,” he says. “Trust me.”

“I don’t actually have to.” The dark man hikes his pant leg to show Rafferty a small automatic tucked into an ankle holster and then he grins like a small boy doing a magic trick.

“On the other hand,” Rafferty says, bringing the barrel of the gun up beneath the man’s chin, “there’s still the one under the hammer. Jesus. Every time you think mankind has evolved, you get slapped in the face with a dead fish.”

“Tell me about it,” says a voice from behind him. A woman.

“Soon as he gives me his gun.”

She sighs. “Do you really think we’d bring you here to kill you?”

“It doesn’t seem efficient. If I know anything about you, it’s that you’re efficient.”

“You came all this way,” Doughnut says, with the sorely tried air of someone forced to state the obvious. “We might as well talk.”

“The clip,” Rafferty says. “These things cost money.”

The man slowly hands it over, watches with total concentration as Rafferty slips the clip back in and secures the automatic beneath his waistband. Then he nods, and Rafferty turns to face Doughnut.

At first glance she is completely unremarkable, someone he would pass on the street and not remember a moment later. He would put her in her forties, but he knows she can’t be. The photos on the
missing disks were taken toward the end of the eighties, and she must have been ten to twelve at the time, like the other children in the AT Series. She can’t be much older than twenty-nine or thirty. After what she has lived through, he thinks, she should look eighty.

Shoulder-length hair, painstakingly parted and brushed, frames a round, somewhat flat face with the low nose and full lips of Isaan. Her skin is dark, unlightened by makeup, its duskiness emphasized by a fine white scar that runs the length of her chin, the result of a slicing wound. She wears the prim pastel clothes of an office lady, a bank teller, someone with a job in the safe world.

The eyes don’t look at the safe world. They are black, the purest, deepest black, and they seem to be set several inches behind the face, like those of someone holding up a costume mask and peering through it. Someone with a lot of practice at estimating arm’s reach and staying outside it.

She submits patiently to his gaze and then gives him a perfunctory smile that tells him he’s looked long enough. “Just a flower seller.”

“You’re just a flower seller,” Rafferty says, “in the same way Joan of Arc was just a farm girl.”

She turns without a word and leads him down the aisle, the four men trailing behind, Joan of Arc’s soldiers in T-shirts and plastic flip-flops. They make two turns, and Rafferty has no idea what direction they’re going in.

“Here,” Doughnut says. They have reached a rickety structure, roughly square and no more than ten feet on a side, framed in unfinished lumber. Chicken wire nailed to the uprights turns it into a cage of sorts. A table, four feet square and topped with scarred plywood, tilts alarmingly in the center of the cage. Flowers stretch away in all directions, sullen smears of color. Doughnut opens a plywood door and stands aside. “Okay?”

“And if it weren’t?” She follows him in without answering. “Your office?”

“Might be, might not be.” She closes the door and takes the seat nearest it. Rafferty takes the seat opposite and sees that the open door concealed a television set wired to a VCR.

“So you’re Poke,” Doughnut says when she is settled. She beats a quick tattoo on the tabletop with her fingernails. “And you think I’m going to tell you my story.”

“It’s me or the police.” He places a hand on the table, and it dips a couple of inches and rocks up again. One leg too short.

She leans back and puts one arm up, over the back of her chair. “Why would I be afraid of the police?”

He sits opposite her. His chair rocks, too. “Because you killed Claus Ulrich.”

Doughnut looks like she is stifling a yawn. “You can prove this?”

“I don’t have to. You were there. You disappeared. You left bloodstains. You were in the pictures. For the cops that’s a royal flush: means, motive, opportunity.”

A golden box of Dunhill cigarettes appears on the table, along with a slender silver lighter, either a Mark Cross or a good knockoff. “The police don’t actually need anything. They just manufacture what they don’t have.” She flips the box open, one-handed. “Why would my story interest you?”

“Because a nice lady came all the way from Australia to learn what happened to Claus, and I told her I’d find out.”

She lights up and plumes smoke from her nostrils. “The famous niece, I suppose.” She rolls the tip of her cigarette gently on the plywood surface of the table to remove a film of ash. The corners of her mouth go down, her first overt display of emotion. “So she asked you. And you always do what you say you’ll do?”

“It makes it easier to get up in the morning.”

The four men are arrayed behind her, tallest to shortest, as though they’ve lined up for a photo, peering in through the chicken wire. She turns to see what he is looking at and waves the men away with the hand holding the cigarette. They melt like gnomes into the flowers. Several moments pass, measured in exhalations of smoke. “Let’s see,” she says at last. “I have a question for you first. Do you think murder is a crime?”

After the week he has had, there is only one truthful reply. “I used to.”

She gazes at the cigarette, turning it in her hand so she can read the gold writing on the filter. “If I killed Claus Ulrich, was that a crime?”

“I saw the pictures,” he says.

“So what you’re saying is, I tell you my story and then wait while you decide my fate.”

Rafferty shifts in the hard chair. “I’m not really comfortable with playing judge.”

She smiles slightly at the evasion. “But that’s what you’re doing.”

“I think I’d like a cigarette.” He hasn’t smoked in almost a year.

She extends the pack and the lighter. “This makes you nervous?” She is very calm.

“I’d smoke used toilet paper to get rid of the smell of these flowers.”

“Too much of anything will make you sick,” she says. “Unless you’re already sick, of course.” She watches him light up. The lighter is a real Mark Cross. He turns it over and sees the initials “C.U.” engraved in a flowing script, fancy as a minaret. “It was his,” she says.

Rafferty turns the lighter over in his hand. “You left an awful lot there. Money, watches, all sorts of stuff. Why take this?”

“I didn’t want anything he’d touched. But he
used
this.” Her gaze floats over his left shoulder, unfocused. “Do you remember the red candles?”

“I’ll remember them my whole life.” The flame haloed in the photographs, the spills of hot wax across the children’s abdomens.

“So will I. So will Toom.” She meets his eyes and gives him the perfunctory smile again. “My older sister. Toom.”

“How did he get his hands on you?”

She regards him for a moment as though he is a distance she will have to cross, and then she sighs. “My mother sold us when I was ten and Toom was twelve,” she says. “A lady came from Bangkok and promised my mother she could find us good work in the city. Washing dishes in a restaurant, she said. When we got bigger, we could be waitresses, with uniforms, two for each of us. She showed my mother a big color picture of the uniform. How I wanted to wear those clothes. I still remember exactly what they looked like.” She draws a
finger down the scar on her chin, and Rafferty would bet she doesn’t know she’s doing it. “The lady told my mother we could make two or three hundred dollars a month in the restaurant. My father didn’t earn two hundred dollars in a year. She offered an advance on our salary. Is any of this new to you?”

People are beginning to move past them, choosing the blooms they will sell in the shops, in the streets. They glance incuriously at the two of them, just a
farang
and a Thai woman, having a conversation, probably bargaining over the price of flowers. “I know about it in the abstract, as something that happens. As a personal story, it’s new.”

“I’m aware it’s not original. The same thing happened to the other girls in the house.”

“What house?”

She shakes her head impatiently. “The one that wasn’t a restaurant. Everything that happened to any of us happened to all of us.”

Rafferty tries to keep the revulsion out of his voice. “You were ten.”

“Almost eleven. And it hurt more than I could believe. But not for long, at least, you know, not down there. I didn’t stay eleven for long either. It was interesting. In no time at all, I was older than my sister. Even though she was twelve. She was the one who kept crying. I was the one who decided, as you Americans like to say, ‘Fuck this.’”

“You tried to escape?”

“Of course. The first time I didn’t even get out of the building. They used wet towels on us. No marks, you see. Customers don’t like scarred girls. They hit us until their arms got tired, and then they gave up. Just locked us up. Toom hadn’t tried to get away, but they beat her anyway, just to show me what would happen if I did it again.”

There is heat inside Rafferty’s chest. “Who were they?”

“Two Chinese men. Lee and Kwan. They were brothers and they owned the house, the restaurant, everything. They owned us. After they beat Toom, I decided to wait. I realized I
could
wait. I learned to live through things. To look at the ceiling, as long as they left me on my back. When they didn’t, I looked at the wall, or the floor, or the pillow, if I was someplace fancy enough to have pillows.”

“How long did this go on?”

“A year, three months, and two days. I was marking the days on the floor under the bed with a pen I had brought with me from my village. My mother had bought it for me so I could write down people’s orders in the restaurant. I was going to smile at them and nod and write down their orders
exactly right.
They were going to love me.”

She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she is gazing at the cigarette in her hand. “Then Claus came along.”

Rafferty can see no change in her face, but she has sunk the fingernails of her left hand into the edge of the table. There are bands of white around the knuckles. He waits.

A deep drag, two jets of smoke. “He didn’t look any worse than anybody else until I realized that the other girls were hiding. They had disappeared through the doors. Behind the sofa. One of the girls who couldn’t get out of the room pissed her pants right there.”

“He took you.”

She shakes her head. “Actually, that time he took her. Her mistake. He liked piss.” She sees him looking at her hand and relaxes it. “He liked pretty much everything, as long as it hurt or humiliated us. I figured out later that what really interested him was hurting us
inside.
It wasn’t enough that we’d bled and been burned and pissed on. We had to feel like we were shit. We had to want to stop living. Some of us tried to.”

The scars on Toom’s wrist, Rafferty thinks but does not say. Something Chouk Ran said comes to mind. “He put a nail through your heart.”

She looks at him, startled. “Yes,” she says. “And the person who got up from that bed was never the same again.” She passes her fingertips over her cheeks as though she was spreading makeup. “But I didn’t know that until he took me.” She drops her hand to the table, slides open the pack of cigarettes and extracts one, lights it off the butt in her hand, and drops the butt to the floor. “And I’m not going to talk about it. I promised myself, after I finished with him, that I would never talk about it again. Never think about it again. It was all I’d thought about for most of my life, do you realize that? Most of
my fucking life I’ve been thinking about Claus Ulrich. Anyway, you saw the pictures of the others. There was nothing special about me. It all happened, and it all hurt, and it all took forever, and that’s all there was to it, except that he took me again and then again. He was thinking up new things. That’s what I thought at the time anyway. It wasn’t until years later, when I opened his filing cabinets and saw the videos, that I realized he wasn’t even a creative pervert. He just imitated the stuff he imported from Japan.”

Her hair, there is something about her hair.

“Such a dull, ordinary man,” she says. “You expect beasts to be different, but they’re not. They’re as boring as everybody else.”

“You can’t tell anything about anybody,” Rafferty says. “You, for instance. Looking at you, no one would ever guess what you’ve survived.” He is studying her hair, the perfection with which it has been brushed. Something stirs inside him.