A Nail Through the Heart (14 page)

“Mmmm. Yes and no.”

She takes a step back. “Well, keep it. I mean, give it back. Put the gun away and let’s just go back to the way we were.”

“There,” he says, finishing the count. “I can’t give it back. The woman who’s paying me is not someone I care to disappoint.”

“Well, I don’t want it. They’ll never be able to repay it.”

“Yes, they will. They’ll be working in two weeks, most of them.”

“Poke, you’re not listening. I can’t do this.”

“That’s part two of my plan,” he says. “The advances are part one. Part two is to get you a partner.”

“A partner.” Her tone is flat, and she locks eyes with him, leans toward him, and takes a quick sniff. “Have you been drinking?”

“I’ll explain it all later.” He indicates the papers under her arm. “What are those?”

She has forgotten she had them. “They were on the floor. The paper tray on your fax is still broken.”

“I’m going to ask the boy to try to fix it. Hank Morrison says the trick is to make them feel useful.”

She hands him the papers, and he gives her the money. She glances down at it and shakes her head, and then she throws her arms around his neck and kisses him on the mouth. When she leaves the room, she is almost running.

Rafferty slips the remaining money back into his pocket. It is significantly slimmer than before. If his spontaneously generated plan for the partnership doesn’t work out, Rose’s business could leave him completely broke. He licks his lips, a little nervously, and tastes her lipstick, and the anxiety eases.

The faxed pages are from Arthit. The first is a Bangkok Police Department cover sheet addressed to LIEUTENANT PHILIP RAFFERTY, RCMP, probably using Poke’s full name and giving him this entirely spurious rank for the benefit of the fax operators who actually sent the message. He scans the pages quickly and then reads them carefully.

Claus Ulrich lacks a police record and has never been mentioned prominently in the Bangkok newspapers. On the other hand, Immigration definitely records two Claus Ulrichs of the same age but with different middle names, one Australian and one British. Both passports have been scanned by Immigration multiple times over the past dozen years or so, coming from points of origin scattered around Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia. The most recent record of the British Claus Ulrich is a departure. Two weeks and three days later, the Australian Claus Ulrich reentered the country and has not left it. That was five months ago.

“So he’s here,” Rafferty says. “One way or another.”

There is less hard data on Madame Wing—to whom Arthit gives the cryptic designation “unknown Chinese woman”—but the single paragraph is rich in implication. She had purchased the house in 1980 for the baht equivalent of $325,000, a tidy sum, especially since it was made in a single cash payment. The walls and gate—and, for all Rafferty knows, a moat full of crocodiles—were added almost immediately afterward with the appropriate permits, a euphemism for bribes. No police record, but several complaints of servant abuse have gone uninvestigated and eventually been dismissed. The source of her income is listed as “unknown.”

It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that Madame Wing is among the privileged few, those who are immune from police interference for anything short of mass murder. Arthit won’t even put
her name in a fax. Complaints are filed, but no one follows up. Either it’s the weight of sheer wealth or she’s connected. Or—third choice—she’s paying through the nose.

If she were paying the police for immunity, though, wouldn’t she have turned to them when her safe was burgled? Why involve a foreigner who doesn’t even have official status in a matter that is apparently so important? Did the safe contain something even her protectors can’t know about—something that would make the price of their services prohibitive?

That would have to be something, he thinks, with massive juju.

He draws a deep breath, wipes away the last of Rose’s lipstick and licks it off his finger, and leaves the apartment to go terrorize somebody.

T
he bang the door makes when it strikes the wall is louder than the cannon in the
1812 Overture
and has even more impact than Rafferty had meant it to have. Its effect on the woman behind the desk at Bangkok Domestics is galvanic: She goes two feet straight into the air and lands standing. Now she waits, with her fingertips over her mouth and her back to the filing cabinet, keeping the desk between them.

“You lied to me.” Rafferty grabs the desk by its edge and tilts it a couple of feet, spilling papers to the floor. He lets it drop with a loud thump that prompts a second instant levitation, this one backward as well as vertical, driving her all the way to the wall. “You told me Ulrich’s maid was killed. That’s
bullshit.”
The woman’s eyes slide past him to the wall and search it frantically. “She’s working downstairs. Probably a job you got her. You want to tell me why?”

A little defensive tug downward on the jacket of today’s suit, a yellow the color of congealing butter. Her eyes drop to the spill of papers at her feet. “You have no right to speak to me like this.”

Rafferty takes a folder from the desk. “Claus Ulrich is probably
dead,
do you realize that?” He slaps the folder onto the desk on the word “dead.” “He’s not some impoverished laborer, he’s a
rich foreigner.”
Slap, slap. The muscles around her eyes bunch up each time, and her fingernails pick at a peel of skin on her lower lip. “He has an
embassy,
for Christ’s sake.” Slap. “What do you think they’re going to do? How high do you think the cops are going to jump when they get the call? You think they’re going to question you politely, maybe over dinner or something? What kind of trouble do you want to be in anyway?”

“I…I just,” she says. She is watching the folder, hoping it stays in the air. “My business…”

“Your business is the least of your worries. This girl was stalking this man, and you knew it. And you
helped her get to him.”
Slap, slap. “Then, when I asked you what happened, you lied to me. Where do you think all this is going?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“Here’s where it’s going.” He shifts to the left, as though he is going to come around the desk, and she dodges away. “If you don’t want to see a picture of yourself wearing handcuffs in the
Bangkok Post,
you’ll tell me what happened, and you’ll do it right now.”

Her fingers come away from her mouth to tug at a large button. She licks her lower lip where she picked at it. “She…ah, she paid me.”

“Yeah, yeah, I already figured that out. Give me details.”

Now the fingers have hold of each other, twisting as though she is trying to find new ways to bend them. “It’s just that we—I mean, I—”

“She came in here a few months ago. With money.” Another slap of the file.

“A lot.” She swallows.

“What’s a lot?”

The hand comes up with all the fingers spread to indicate five. “Five thousand dollars. Two hundred thousand baht.”

Rafferty sits in the visitor’s chair. “Sit down.
Now.
Keep talking.”

The woman feels her way to her chair as though the room is
pitch-black and lowers herself into it very carefully. “She…well, she said she wanted to work for Mr. Ulrich. I explained that we don’t do things that way. She said procedures could always be changed, and she began to put money on my desk.”

“And?”

“And she…she said she was sure I could find a way. She had all this money in her lap, and she kept putting bundles of it on the desk.”

“Business any good?” Rafferty asks, looking up at the photos of happier times.

“Terrible. We’ve been on the verge of closing forever. The economic crisis, and there are so
many
agencies now. Every month we say we can’t go on, and every month we do anyway.”

“So you needed the money,” Rafferty says.

“Desperately. We still do.”

“And here she was,” he offers, “loaded with cash.”

The blink he gets could be gratitude or just relief. “I told her she needed a domestic reference to get a job with Mr. Ulrich. I couldn’t give her a false reference, because Mr. Ulrich was sure to check, do you see? And while she was sitting here, Madame—you know,
Madame
—called and said she needed somebody strong and stupid. Those were her exact words, somebody strong and stupid. And I said I might have the person for her, and I covered the phone and told the girl what Madame…uh, Madame Wing had said, and she said, ‘I can be strong and stupid.’ I told Madame Wing I had a girl for her, but she demanded to see three or four. I was trying to talk her out of it when the girl passed me a note she had written. It said, ‘Tell her you’re so certain this is the right girl that you won’t even charge a fee.’”

“And Madame Wing went for it.”

A nod. “She worked there a few weeks and got herself fired, which is easy to do in that house, and then she actually stood up to her and got herself a reference. I couldn’t believe it,” she says, shaking her head. “
Nobody
stands up to Madame Wing.”

“But there was still Ulrich’s first maid. Noot.”

The woman shakes her head, in the negative this time. “Doughnut
had already talked to Noot; that was how she got my name. Noot had wanted to quit for a long time. Mr. Ulrich is apparently…ah, peculiar. So I got Noot the job with Mr. Choy, who was happy to steal her. Mr. Ulrich is not well liked in that apartment house.”

“Just so we’re clear,” Rafferty says, “you are in this up to your neck.”

A wince, as though he had swung at her. “So after Noot quit, I told Mr. Ulrich the same thing I told Madame Wing. I’d send him one girl, and if he took her, there’d be no fee.”

“Do you know where she is now?”

Her head is going side to side before he finishes the question. “No idea.”

“Didn’t you wonder why she was so eager? Didn’t it worry you? She had obviously been watching the man, or she wouldn’t have known who Noot was. She could have been up to anything.”

“She’s just a girl.”

“So was Lizzie Borden. There had to be some kind of connection between them.”

The woman looks down at her desk, possibly trying to work out who Lizzie Borden is. “I asked her about that. She said that Mr. Ulrich would understand it when it was time.”

“I wonder if he did.” Rafferty pulls the guest chair closer to the desk. The woman flinches. “Anything more? Anything at all?”

“No. That’s all. That’s everything.”

“Okay, phase two.” Rafferty takes out his notepad and writes a phone number on it and then slides it over to her. Then he reaches in his pocket and begins to peel off hundred-dollar bills. Her eyes are glued to the money.

“This is twenty-five hundred dollars,” he says, dropping it on the desk. “You earn it by calling the woman whose number I’ve just given you and saying you’ll get some of her girls work. There are thirteen of them. You get an additional twenty-five hundred dollars when they’re all employed and you’ve worked out an arrangement with this woman so that she gets part of the employment fee and she can send you more girls in the future. She’s going to be your main supplier.”

“But the girls. Who are they? Where do they come from?”

“They’ve all been working in the hospitality industry. And they’ll all have a reference. From me.”

“I don’t know,” says the woman, her eyes still on the money.

“You know the old saying about the carrot and the stick?”

“An English expression. Yes.”

“This is the carrot,” he says, flicking the stack of money. “The stick is a real motherfucker.”

“ARTHIT?” RAFFERTY SAYS
into the cell phone as the
tuk-tuk
plods along Sukhumvit Road, congested as always. Robed Arabs glide along the sidewalk, so they must be near the Grace Hotel. “Tam’s wife says the Cambodian was a violinist.”

“So find him. Maybe you can get him to play ‘Melancholy Baby.’”

“I need the names of the people who were in the jail cell with Tam. Surely only one or two of them were Cambodian. Names, mug shots, booking info.”

“Fax it to the RCMP?” Arthit says in a much brisker tone. Someone has obviously come into his office.

“Attention of Lieutenant Rafferty.”

“I think that should be ‘Leftenant,’” Arthit says.

“The missing maid was a setup. Paid her way into Madame Wing’s employ.”

“Do you think she was involved in what happened at Klong Toey?”

“I don’t know.
Somebody
was inside, because they knew where to dig for the safe. One neat hole, no false starts. I’m pretty sure it was the guard, though. I don’t think Doughnut was there long enough to know anything about it. Also, anyone can see that the guard had something to do with it.”

“Why is that?”

“One look will tell you. There’s no way this happened the way he said it did.”

“Noted, Leftenant.” Arthit hangs up.

The
tuk-tuk
makes a two-wheeled left into a little
soi
and slows as Rafferty reads addresses. The building he wants is featureless gray concrete, six stories high, with windows no wider than archery slits. Washing hangs on poles protruding from the windows. One look tells Rafferty the building will not have an elevator. “Wait here,” he says to the
tuk-tuk
driver, handing him two hundred baht. “I’ll be out in ten, fifteen minutes.”

The fired guard lives on the fifth floor. Rafferty is winded and sweating when he comes out of the stairwell into a narrow, uncarpeted hallway featuring grime-gray walls patterned with the prints of dirty hands. A single fluorescent bulb sheds light the color of skim milk. The veins on the back of Rafferty’s hand stand out like a map of blue highways as he knocks on the door.

Nothing. He knocks, waits some more. No response, no sound from inside. No telltale darkening of the peephole positioned at eye level. He knocks a third time, just for form’s sake, and then tears a page from his notebook and writes on it in a child’s Thai, handwriting that Miaow would ridicule. What he writes is,
“Talk to me or I’ll tell Madame Wing about the rock.”
He puts his name and phone number at the bottom of the page, folds it in half, and slips it between the door and the jamb, at eye level so it will be seen by anyone who opens the door.

The
tuk-tuk
is at the curb, the driver asleep at the wheel. The shift in the vehicle’s weight as Rafferty climbs in wakes him, and he blinks a couple of times and says, “Where?”

Rafferty pages through his notebook, finds the record of his talk with Madame Wing. There it is: the maid’s sister’s address, for whatever it’s worth. But it’s too late to go all the way to Banglamphoo. “Silom,” Rafferty says. “Around Soi 8.”

“You go all over,” the driver observes conversationally, pulling away from the curb.

“I am a stone,” Rafferty says mystically. “I go where I am kicked.” He settles back. “Right now I’m being kicked to a department store.”