A Nail Through the Heart (6 page)

C
losets are always a good place to start. Claus Ulrich’s closet contains a great many linen shirts, every color of the rainbow and a few that got left out in the interest of good taste. The labels proclaim that they are size XXL, ordered from an expensive catalog that pretends to sell clothing to the fashionable world traveler, the kind who puts on a bush jacket to watch the Discovery Channel. Ulrich has arranged the garments to hang bright to dark, a dandy’s spectrum. To the right are ten or twelve carefully folded pairs of pleated linen slacks, waist size 46, all beige. Rafferty hears his mother’s voice:
Beige goes with anything.

But it had not, apparently, gone with Claus Ulrich when he passed through the front door with its surprising assembly of locks. Nor had the open suitcase containing a week’s worth of lightweight clothes, stashed in the back of the closet. In writing his travel books, it has never once occurred to Rafferty to remind people not to forget their suitcase.

An hour in the apartment tells Rafferty several things. First, he is
the only person to enter it in weeks. The air conditioner has been off all that time, letting the heat and damp attack the rug and drapes and corrupt the foam-rubber cushions of the couch. The smell is as dank as wet leaves, and the heat gives Rafferty a blinding headache.

The headache leads to a second discovery. Looking for an aspirin in the medicine cabinet, he finds a trove of painkillers that, taken cumulatively, could prepare an elephant for surgery. He swallows a couple of ibuprofen the size of jawbreakers and surveys the remainder of Claus Ulrich’s pharmacopoeia: prescription drugs for indigestion, powerful antihistamines, and, most interesting of all, three bottles of nitroglycerine tablets, one of them with the protective seal broken. Claus Ulrich has a heart condition and he keeps the emergency remedy right at hand.

So why are the tablets here when Uncle Claus isn’t? Rafferty goes back and rifles through the suitcase. An unopened bottle of nitroglycerine, sealed in a Ziploc bag, is folded carefully into a shirt.

In addition to chronic pain, indigestion, allergies, and an erratic heart, Claus Ulrich has both money and taste. It’s terrible taste, and there’s a lot of it on view. Ulrich’s eye runs to the rococo: Wooden objects tend to be heavily gilded and intricately filigreed with curls, gewgaws, and little bulbous tumors that might be either bunches of grapes or the scrotal sac of some alien organism with ten or twelve testicles. The ornate furniture sits beneath walls that are heavily hung with massive gilt-framed mirrors and hand-painted reproductions of dark museum oils. Rafferty looks more closely and sees filmy nymphs of indeterminate sex, cavorting on swings in some sylvan setting that’s probably slated for development. Taken
tout ensemble
, the room has the cosmetic appeal of a fever blister.

The only exceptions—the only things in the place Rafferty would allow within ten feet of his own front door—are two remarkable Khmer apsarases, winged angels, carved in sandstone and maybe eight hundred years old. They’re ethereally beautiful, and Rafferty makes a note to talk with a dealer in Cambodian antiquities who works out of the Oriental Hotel.

Not exactly Aussie taste, Rafferty thinks. In his somewhat limited
experience, Australian men run more toward dark hardwood and leather: Cut down some trees, skin a few cattle, hammer together a living room set, and hope it doesn’t sprout branches. See if your dog tries to herd it.

There are five rooms, four of them twinkling densely with froufrou and bric-a-brac: living room, kitchen, den, and two bedrooms. In the den Rafferty learns that Uncle Claus is au courant with the computer age. A 1.8-gigahertz Dell with a flat-screen monitor sits incongruously on the nineteenth-century desk, a triumph of veneers and inlay. When Rafferty boots the machine, it defaults to Netscape, and a dial-up connection stakes out the screen and demands a password. Stacks of CD-ROM disks, Bangkok counterfeits of popular software programs, are slotted in a four-foot-high plastic storage tower. There’s a lot more software, Rafferty thinks, than most people would need: four word-processing programs, two spreadsheets, three graphics suites, several project planners, even two programs for writing screenplays. About fifteen games. He pokes the storage tower with an index finger, making it wobble. Why would anyone need four word-processing programs?

He turns off the computer and gives the desk’s single drawer a cursory rummage. Uncle Claus is a neat freak. He bundles business cards with a rubber band, alphabetized by company. Paper clips are segregated by size. Forty or fifty sheets of blank letterhead proclaim something called AT Enterprises, but there is no correspondence. His monthly bills are tied neatly in annual bundles. The bills are moderately interesting: He’s spending a fortune on the phone but not calling long distance, so either he’s incurably chatty or he spends a lot of time online. There’s also an invoice from a company called Bangkok Domestics. Rafferty puts that one in his pocket.

In the far corner of the office stands a filing cabinet, a three-drawer beige rectangle that looks vaguely hangdog at being so proletarian. It is locked, so Rafferty gives it a pass.

Entering the master bedroom, Rafferty feels as though he has stepped into a painting on velvet or a malarial fever dream. Crimson carpets support a canopied bed, gussied up with a tasseled satin
spread. Looking around, Rafferty feels that Elvis might appear at any moment, sheathed in an unearthly light. On the table next to the bed is an expensive wristwatch, a gold Vacheron Constantin no thicker than a quarter.

Another thing Rafferty rarely suggests to his readers: Don’t forget your watch.

Beside the watch are two photographs. One is of a fat man with thinning hair combed forward in a sort of Bill Haley spit curl above the apprehensive expression of a man who is the last in the room to get a joke. He has a pale mustache trimmed too short over full, sensual lips that look oddly naked. The other is of a young girl, whom Rafferty recognizes as a young and even unhappier version of Clarissa. Rafferty takes the portrait of Uncle Claus to send to Arthit.

The second, and smaller, bedroom breaks the mold. Tucked away at the rear of the flat and lacking an air conditioner, it contains nothing but an unpainted wooden dresser and a narrow bed, just a thin mattress atop an iron frame. The gray concrete slab of the floor is bare and looks recently scrubbed. The grit of a powdered cleanser scrapes beneath his shoes. Rafferty is willing to bet that this was the room that housed the oddly named Doughnut.

In addition to its spartan simplicity, it is different from the rest of the flat in another way: It has been completely emptied and then scoured. Not one trace of its former occupant remains. So if Uncle Claus and his wonderful new maid left together, only Doughnut knew she was going.

N
ever heard of him,” Leon Hofstedler says.

“Oh, come on, Leon.” Rafferty shamelessly signals for the Expat Bar’s ageless barmaid, whom the regulars call Toots, to top up Leon’s vast stein. “You’re the living map of expat Bangkok. You know everybody.”

“Nice of you to say so, too,” Leon says comfortably, watching the foam rise. “But this is one German I don’t know.”

Rafferty holds up the photo, but Hofstedler’s eyes slide over it without recognition. “He’s not German, he’s just got a German name. He’s an Aussie.”

“Claus the Aussie?” Hofstedler packs the words with irony leaden enough to deflect gamma rays. He is playing to the house, which is to say to the collection of aging sex addicts who call the bar home. Rafferty mildly enjoys them individually, but as a group they comprise a new paradigm of what he doesn’t want to be when he grows up. On the other hand, they collectively know more about one aspect of Bangkok than Rafferty does, and that’s the aspect he thinks might
have drawn Uncle Claus to desert his life in Australia—niece and all—and live here.

There was a time, if he is honest with himself, when this room could have been part of his future. Had he not met Rose, had he not seen through the rented smiles, had he not found himself focusing on the bewildered eyes of the girls who hadn’t yet learned the game, he might eventually have been sitting here. In his heart he knows that the gulf separating him from these men can always be crossed. Bangkok is packed with men who have crossed it.

Hoftstedler lifts the stein to eye level and regards Poke around it. “There is no Australian called Claus anywhere, and certainly not in Bangkok. Australians have names like Hughie and Paul and Geoff.”

“I didn’t name him, Leon. I’m just looking for him.” This earns a snicker from the Growing-Younger Man, halfway down the bar. The snicker barely sends a ripple through facial muscles so saturated with Botox that Rafferty wonders how the man chews his food. New plugs of hair dot the previously barren area above the Growing-Younger Man’s forehead like a failing crop. He has spent a small fortune on cosmetic surgery, trying to appeal to bar girls one-third his age, and the result is a sad little froth of Brillo above a face as mobile as the mask of Agamemnon.

For a moment Rafferty thinks he will speak, but Hofstedler plows over whatever he might have been going to say. “You will have to look elsewhere,” he says. He lifts the stein to his lips and puts a pint of Singha into the past tense. Then he belches, pats himself on the chest, and leans toward the dim end of the bar. “What about you, Bob?”

Bob Campeau, sunk in permafrost gloom at the far end, says, “He go to any clubs? Patpong? Nana Plaza? Soi Cowboy?” Campeau is the resident expert on Bangkok’s more garish red-light districts. The others in the bar may cherish the occasional romantic illusion about the women they rent for the evening, mistaking really creative avarice for affection, but not Campeau. The man is a walking catalog of girlie bars; he can rattle off the specialties, merits, drawbacks, costs, and take-out policies of every joint in the city. He has never completely forgiven Poke for removing Rose from circulation.

“Not that I know,” Rafferty says.

Campeau lifts his glass and eyes the bottom, apparently in the hope it refilled itself while he wasn’t looking. “Then I don’t know him, do I?”

“And he has been here how long?” Hofstedler asks.

“Decades,” Rafferty says. “That’s one reason I figured you might know him.” There is a brief silence as Hofstedler ponders the improbability of his not knowing someone who has been in Bangkok such a long time.

Campeau chews ice. The Growing-Younger Man fingers his hair plugs and sips his green cocktail, made from some obscure age-reversing algae he imports by the carton from California. Everyone except him gets a minute older.

“Is your missing friend gay, Poke?” Mac O’Connor asks from the isolation of his accustomed booth, the Expat Bar’s version of the back of the bus. “There’s a Claus who pops up at Narcissus occasionally.”

“I suppose he could be gay. He’s unmarried,” Rafferty says. Hofstedler gives a disapproving cluck on behalf of the room’s heterosexual population. None of them is married, the better to pursue their obsession with the go-go dancers for whom they uprooted whatever lives they had to move to Bangkok. “What’s your Claus look like, Mac?”

O’Connor tents his fingers and peers through them. “Dishy in that kind of seedy way that suggests piercings in unexpected places. About twenty-four or—”

“Wrong Claus, Mac.” Rafferty displays the picture again. “This guy’s in his fifties and big as a house.”

“Definitely
the wrong Claus. Not likely to be at Narcissus either. If you’re over thirty these days, forget it. It’s getting so they barely let you in if you shave.”

“Such a life,” Hofstedler says unpleasantly. “Such values, yes?”

“I don’t notice you taking home any matrons,” Mac says from the safety of his booth.

“Okay,” Rafferty says, getting up. “He keeps a low profile, doesn’t mingle with the European community here, he’s probably not gay, he
doesn’t go to clubs, and he’s got an awkward name. I guess that’s information. Sort of.”

“He is not leading an open life,” Hofstedler observes. “Do you know what kind of a man he is?”

“A small-time saint, from what I’ve been told, although my source is biased.”

“I doubt he’s a saint,” Hofstedler says.

“Why? Because he doesn’t troll the bars?”

“One reason people come here, as I believe you said in your book,” Hofstedler continues comfortably, “is that here it is possible to behave openly in ways that one would hide at home.”

“I wrote that?” Rafferty says.

“It makes you wonder, does it not,” Hofstedler says, “what kind of behavior one would hide in Bangkok.”

I
was really little,” Miaow says without preamble. She is speaking Thai. “Maybe five or four.” Miaow has no idea how old she actually is, so they took a vote and decided she’s eight, although she could be a big seven or a small nine. “I slept under bridges. There were rats there that bit my fingers. When it rained, I slept in the doors of stores that were closed. Men came around all the time to chase us away. At night I went behind restaurants and waited for them to close. They throw away a lot of food, did you know that?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rafferty says. On his lap is a plastic bag containing a bright pink T-shirt, which Miaow bought for him on the sidewalk. He is perspiring against the plastic, but he doesn’t want to move the bag.

“Well, I didn’t know it until some other kid told me. We had to keep changing restaurants. If a place threw away really good food, the big kids would learn about it and take it all.” She looks at a large spot on the carpet for a moment—a spot Rafferty and Rose have been bat
tling for weeks—and then out at the balcony. “Kids can be mean, you know. Some adults think all kids are cute, but we’re not. Some kids are as mean as adults.”

“I’m sorry, Miaow.” She rarely speaks of her life before he met her. Much of what he knows about it he has learned from the pictures she draws, Crayola nightmares of children huddling together on sidewalks surrounded by adult knees. Once in a while, there’s an adult face with big, sharp, white teeth.

“No problem,” she says. “It’s the way it was.” She brushes a stray hair from her face and runs her palms over her head to make sure her part is straight. It’s an aspect of the world she can control. “I wasn’t big enough to sell gum. So I just asked people for money. But most days nobody gave me any. I was really, really hungry. It was all I could think about.”

“Poor baby,” he says without thinking. She usually meets pity with scorn, but today she lets it pass.

“It’s hard to sleep when you’re hungry. You know you’re going to wake up hungry. You know you’ll be hungry all day. Sometimes I got so hungry I fell down.”

“That should never have happened.”

“It happens to lots of kids. It’s happening right now. Out there.” She lifts her chin to the glass doors and the city beyond.

Rafferty pats her hand, feeling the insipidity of the gesture all the way to his bones.

“It’s hard to make friends, because kids come and go. They get taken by the police or something. So you stop trying. You think it’s better alone. But then there’s nobody to tell you things, like new places to sleep or which men are bad. I didn’t know who I should run away from.”

He has never asked her about this. They have never discussed whether she was abused sexually, in part because he doesn’t know how to ask and in part because he isn’t sure he could handle his rage if she was. He knows that an act of sudden physical intimacy—an unexpected hug, for instance—makes her go rigid, and sometimes she strikes out reflexively with fists and fingernails.

“I was frightened all the time,” she says. “I
hurt
. I remember when I lost one shoe in the summer and my bare foot got so burned on the pavement I couldn’t walk. There were holes in my skin. I found a piece of wood in the street and put it under my foot and tied it with a plastic bag. It made me limp because it didn’t bend, and people thought I was crippled. I got more money then, so I put a cloth around it, like a bandage.” She breaks off, listening to herself. “It was a pink shoe,” she says regretfully. “I looked everywhere for it.”

She rests her hand on his forearm and keeps it there, fingers open and palm up. She rarely touches him. Her voice changes and softens. Up until now she has been talking to the room; now her words are aimed directly at him. “What I wanted then was to sleep at night and have food and a place to get clean. I was dirty all the time. Just like Superman. I never thought I would live this high above the sidewalk. In the air. I never thought I would go to school.”

Rafferty does not trust himself to speak. Finally he says, “You deserve everything, Miaow. You give me more than I give you.”

“Nuh-uh,” she says, and adds in English, “I make problems for you.”

“I love you,” he says. “You make me happy.”

For a moment she leans her head against his arm, and Rafferty feels as though his heart will dissolve. It lasts only a second or two, and then she is sitting upright again, and he can hear her swallow.

“One day this boy came up to me with a handful of flowers, and he said, ‘Come with me.’”

“Superman,” Rafferty says.

She gives him a long look. “His name then was Boo.”

“Okay, Boo.”

“He took me to a room,” she says, “on a little
soi.
There was a big woman there, a really fat woman. She had gold bracelets. And a whole bunch of little kids on the floor, making garlands out of the flowers.” She pauses, working out the order of the story she wants to tell.

“So you sold the flowers,” Rafferty prompts. Bangkok’s garland sellers, children of five and six, work the city’s busiest intersections, approaching drivers at stoplights to sell the fragrant loops of flowers
offered at shrines. It is filthy, dangerous work. The children breathe carbon monoxide all day. Occasionally they are hit by cars. “For how long?”

“A long time,” Miaow says.

“And were things better then?”

“I had some money. I could eat every day, and I had a place to sleep. But then—” She withdraws her hand. “Then everything was bad again.”

“What happened?”

She takes the bag from his lap and pulls the T-shirt out. She looks at him and then at it. Very carefully, she folds it into the smallest possible square. Then she unfolds it slowly, as though she hopes to find some answer written on it. “What happened,” she says, “is that Boo went crazy.”