A Nail Through the Heart (2 page)

The man who called himself Chon stands over the hole, looking down, waiting to shoot again if he must. The flashlight is gripped beneath his left arm, and the right hand holds the silenced pistol. His mouth is a sad, tight line. Tam lies facedown in the muddy water, one arm raised, caught against the side of the hole, the fingers extended like someone waving good-bye.

When it is evident that Tam is not going to move, the man who calls himself Chon puts the gun in his pocket, skirts the hole, and picks up the envelope and the photographs. Without looking at the
pictures, he slides them back inside the envelope. Then he lays the envelope on top of Tam’s jacket and jumps into the hole.

It takes him a minute to wrestle Tam out of the mud, rolling him onto the lawn before he climbs out himself. He lifts Tam by the shoulders and drapes him over the safe on his stomach, his arms and legs splayed out. The man studies the effect for a moment and then picks up the envelope and slips it into the front of his pants, flat against his stomach. He bends down again and grabs Tam’s jacket and spreads it out on the lawn several feet away, in the direction of the house, making it as big as he can.

He does not fill in the hole. Instead he lays the shovel down so the cutting edge is pointing like an arrow toward the dark opening.

Twenty-two minutes later, when the guard returns, he first sees the great splash of mud around the hole, then the shovel, and then Tam’s body. He stops where he stands as though listening for something; then very slowly turns in a full circle, scanning the grassy area, washed by moonlight, and the deep shadows beneath the trees. When he has completed his circle, he moves, as tentatively as someone who expects the ground to give way beneath him, up the lawn toward the house.

At the border of a flower bed, he stoops and comes up with a large, smooth, white stone, the size of a small coconut. He takes the stone in both hands, raises it high, and brings it down with all his strength on the top of his own head.

His knees soften and he staggers, but once he has regained his equilibrium, he raises the stone again and brings it down once more, striking the same spot on his head. He reaches up to the wound. When he brings his hand away, it is slick with blood. He smears the blood on his face and shirt and then walks, as carefully as a drunk man, down to the edge of the pier, where he drops the stone in the grass, where he is sure it will be found. His story will need all the support he can provide. As he works his way back toward the house, wobbling on legs that will barely carry his weight, he paints himself with more blood.

At the back door, he pauses and listens, although he knows the
place is empty. Logically, he knows that the woman who owns the house can’t be in two places at once, but after working for her for twenty years, nothing about her would surprise him. Squaring his shoulders, he goes inside.

The door closes behind him, and the moon shines down on the empty house and the dark figure sprawled on the lawn, the corona of mud surrounding the hole like the ring around a target, and the jacket empty and open like a signal. Empty and open like a flag.

A
blur at the edge of sight, a blue blur across the sidewalk, and Rafferty feels Miaow stop in her tracks, yanking him back with all the mass an eight-year-old can muster. The blur collides with a stout woman, knocking her sideways. Hands grab at her to keep her from going down. The blur pauses just enough to resolve itself into a running child, and then Miaow drops Rafferty’s hand like a stone, all but pushing him aside with a shriek that scrapes the upper limit of the audible spectrum.

The blue child launches itself off the sidewalk, splitting the distance between two cars, aloof as a subatomic particle, and vanishes into traffic. Miaow, her pigtails flying, has covered half the distance to the curb before Rafferty can get his body organized, but then he sets off at a dead run, without even scanning the crowd for Rose, who is somewhere ahead of them on the sidewalk, on her way to buy the evening’s dinner.

Silom Road is jammed this late Sunday afternoon with shoppers and tourists threading between the sidewalk vendors’ booths.
Rafferty shoulders past several of them, earning a shout of warning in some unknown language, and then slams his hip against a rickety plywood booth piled with hill-tribe souvenirs as he sees Miaow leap from the curb and into the path of a battered taxi. More shouts as the booth splinters to the concrete behind him, the taxi swerves right, and then Miaow is gone, too.

When in doubt,
Rafferty thinks,
stop.

The sky is low enough to scrape a nail against, that peculiar sullen gray that usually precedes one of Bangkok’s frequent rainstorms. Rafferty is aware of the livid greenness of the trees, of the wind that has kicked up to make the empty plastic bags dance on the pavement, of his heart hammering in the vein at the side of his neck. Aware that both children have disappeared.

The taxi that stopped for Miaow is stalled in front of him, and Rafferty skirts it at a trot, looking for anything that could be a running child. He hears another shout, across the six lanes of Silom this time, and the blue blur reappears and disappears in a blink around the corner of a narrow
soi
, leaving Rafferty with a mental snapshot of a dirty blue T-shirt and baggy, low-slung blue trousers, torn and flapping below the child’s right knee. Hair, long and knotted, bounced over the blue shirt as he—she?—ran. Behind the ragged child, in full charge, is Miaow.

Spaces open between the cars in front of him, giving him just room enough to dodge between them. Miaow lived most of her eight years on the sidewalks of Bangkok before Rafferty found her, but he chases after her, weaving suicidally through traffic as though she were a rich, pampered preschooler wandering outside the family compound for the first time.

He gets across the street and under the elevated track for the sky train somehow—later he will be unable to remember any of it—but by the time he makes the turn into the
soi
, she is gone. The sidewalks host a few harried-looking pedestrians, all adults. There is not a child in sight.

The other end of the
soi
—one of the countless small streets branching off Silom—is too distant for Miaow to have reached it. The buildings are raw, shiny apartment houses, too new to have acquired the city’s distinctive petrochemical tarnish. Their doors are guarded against
unattached children. A third of the way down the block, he sees a driveway, leading to an open underground garage. He takes off at a run.

The driveway slopes so steeply that he has to lean backward against the incline. The afternoon sun has dropped behind the building, darkening the interior of the garage, and he slows to a walk, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

Thin, watery sunlight leaks through small, sidewalk-level ventilation grilles, casting elongated patterns on the concrete floor. The far corners fade into gloom. Fewer than twenty cars occupy a space big enough to accommodate a hundred.

“Miaow?” The name ping-pongs off the walls. Rafferty can hear his fear in the echoes.

Nothing. His pulse bumps beneath the skin of his throat like someone tapping him with a finger. Moving slowly toward the right side of the garage, where the majority of the cars are, he quiets his breathing so he can listen. Horns from the street, the catch of an engine. Outside, a woman laughs.

A scuffling sound off to his left terminates in a fierce, choked whisper.

Rafferty goes on the balls of his feet, moving faster. A cluster of dusty cars looms ahead, four or five of them. One of them rocks suddenly as something slams into its side. Rafferty starts running again, and when he rounds the car’s rear fender, he sees Miaow planted on her backside on the cement floor, her feet wedged against a tire, both hands wrapped in the blue T-shirt of the other child, who is straining to pull away. The second child—it is a boy, Rafferty sees, with sharply angled cheekbones beneath a mat of filthy hair—flails at her arms with clenched fists.

The boy’s back is to him. Miaow’s eyes come up to meet Rafferty’s, and he sees her shake her head
no,
although he’s not sure what the no means, and the boy’s head snaps around. When he catches sight of Rafferty, his eyes narrow so far they almost disappear, his lips peel back from his teeth in an animal snarl, and he screams, so high it goes through Rafferty’s head like a bullet. It caroms off the walls in all directions, a human distress siren.

The boy kicks out at Miaow with new urgency, the torn trouser leg flapping against the thin calf, and Miaow dodges the kicks left and right, and then, as the boy raises his right foot to kick at her head, she whips her own leg around and sweeps his left foot out from under him. The boy goes down on his back. Miaow scrambles up onto him, straddling his chest and sinking her knees into his shoulders. They fight in complete silence. The boy batters at her back with his legs, so hard that Rafferty can hear his knees strike, but Miaow bears down, and Rafferty suddenly realizes how much weight the child has gained since she started living with him. The boy, whose elbow joints are the widest part of his stick-thin arms, cannot throw her off.

Rafferty approaches from behind her and looks down at the boy’s face. Confronted by an adult at such close range, the boy goes limp, a trapped animal giving up hope. He stops kicking, and his head rolls to the right. He is completely still. He seems to be studying the car’s tire. His face is filthy beneath the shock of knotted hair. The eye Rafferty can see seems to be infected; it is red and swollen. Automatically, Rafferty reaches down, and Miaow slaps his hand away.

“He bites,” she says in English. The boy’s head rolls around at the sound of a foreign language. When he sees Rafferty’s face, he freezes. Even the damaged eye looks confused. Rafferty’s native English and half-Asian looks, courtesy of his Filipina mother, have bewildered the Thais since his arrival in Bangkok. “Back up.” Miaow doesn’t look up at him. “Not so close.”

He retreats four or five steps, enough to give the boy some room but close enough to get involved if necessary. Miaow leans forward and whispers for several moments. The boy shakes his head violently, and Miaow leans in and looses a torrent of Thai, too fast for Rafferty to follow, although he can make out
jai dee
, which translates into “good heart” or “good person,” one of the language’s supreme compliments. The boy looks up at her for a long moment, the left eye swollen almost shut, and then snarls a short, bitter question. Miaow shakes her head in the negative and waits. After a good ten seconds, the boy lifts his head, and his eyes go past Miaow and settle on Rafferty. They look at him and through him. Once, for an article he was
writing, Rafferty interviewed a monk who had just emerged from four years of solitude. Except for the moment when that man’s eyes fell on him, he has never been looked at like this in his life.

At last the fierce eyes release him. The boy lets his head drop back on the concrete. Then he makes a minute nod, not so much assent as surrender, looking at neither of them.

Miaow slowly lifts her hands from his wrists and, keeping her eyes on the boy, climbs off. With one hand behind her, she waves for Rafferty to come closer. He does, but he is careful not to get too close to either child. The world they have inhabited for the past few minutes is not his.

Looking over Miaow’s shoulder, Rafferty sees a boy who could be ten or twelve and who probably weighs less than sixty pounds. The injured eye is as red as a geranium. He has a short, broad nose; heavy, unnaturally red lips; and tight-lidded, enraged-looking eyes. A bruise, not a new one, swells on his right cheek. The neck of his T-shirt is twisted, revealing a shoulder with a bone structure as delicate as a bird’s. The shirt may once have been sky blue, but now it is dark with grime and pitted with holes big enough to push a finger through. A red, irregular
S
has been scribbled with some kind of marker on the front of the T-shirt.

The boy glares up at Rafferty. His broad nostrils flare like those of an animal smelling blood. Rafferty thinks he should have known that the boy bites even without Miaow’s warning.

Miaow steps away and offers the boy a hand up. He ignores it and stands on his own, the furious eyes still fixed on Rafferty. Miaow looks up at Rafferty, and he can see the urgency drawing tight the muscles of her face, but he does not know what it means. Most surprising, tear tracks glisten on her cheeks. Rafferty knows she could survive a cataclysm dry-eyed.

She indicates the thin, dirty boy with one hand. “This is Superman,” she says. Her voice comes from a throat as constricted as her face. “He’s coming with us.”

T
he boy’s glare says,
This close but no closer
. Every minute or so, he turns back to look at Rafferty. If the distance has narrowed, the boy speeds up, as though he is keeping an iron rod between the two of them. Miaow has her hand on the boy’s elbow, which startles Rafferty; Miaow does not touch people often.

Dusk has fallen, a wash of gray tinted with the cold, electric spectrum of neon. People glance at the thickening sky, at their watches, at the lighted shop windows. Groups of foreign men plow the sidewalk, beginning the long nighttime prowl that will take them to the girl-packed bars of Patpong Road, dead ahead.

Seen from Rafferty’s perspective, six feet back, the children look like a cautionary UNICEF poster: the well-nourished child and the starving one. Superman probably weighs twenty pounds less than Miaow, even though he is two inches taller. The skin on his neck and arms is mottled with camouflage patches of dirt and an irregular pattern of bumpy, red irritation. With a rush of irritation of his own, Rafferty thinks,
Scabies
.

He feels a cool hand on his arm.

“What’s this about?” Rose asks. He looks back to see an unanswerable argument for the effectiveness of evolution: six elegant feet of perfectly assembled Thai womanhood. She wears one of Rafferty’s white shirts, blindingly clean and as unwrinkled as an angel’s robe, a pair of faded jeans, and the inevitable outsize pink plastic watch. She looks as though she has never perspired in her life. Her eyes are on the children.

“He’s coming with us,” Rafferty says, unconsciously mimicking Miaow’s tone. They are speaking Thai.

Rose nods once. “I see.” Her tone could cool the entire block. She is extremely choosy about who comes into the apartment they sometimes share.

Rafferty looks down at the bagful of vegetables and noodles dangling from Rose’s hand and changes the subject. “You did the shopping.”

“Someone has to.” She has removed her hand from his arm now, and they walk on together, maintaining their distance from the children and a proper separation from each other. In public, Rose is always proper. “Especially if you’re going to bring home someone new every time you go out,” she says. When Rafferty does not reply, she adds neutrally, “He’s extremely dirty.”

“It’s Miaow’s idea. I thought I’d stop at Siam Drug and get some shampoo for lice and some skin ointment. See if we can’t get rid of whatever’s hitching a ride.”

“I’ll do it,” Rose says. Her tone does not invite discussion. “You just take them home and get him into the tub. Burn his clothes. Don’t let him sit anywhere. He’s riddled with bugs.”

“I think it’s better if you do it.” Rafferty lowers his voice, although there is no sign that the children are listening. “He doesn’t like me.”

Ahead of them the boy turns back again to check on Rafferty and does a literal double take when he registers Rose. He looks away for a second, like someone trying to shake off a mirage, and, to Rafferty’s surprise, Rose slips her hand into his, in defiance of her own rules. The boy looks back again and gazes at them for a long moment,
letting Miaow guide him. Some of the rigidity goes out of his face. His shoulders drop a full inch as his spine relaxes. In place of the “stop right there” glare, there is assessment. He says something to Miaow, and she hits him playfully on the head, a mock insult. For the first time, the boy smiles. He socks her on the shoulder, and she grabs her shoulder and hops on one leg, pretending it hurts.

“What’s all that mean?” Rafferty demands. Miaow doesn’t jump up and down on one leg and hug her arm when
he
pretends to sock her on the shoulder.

“He’s afraid of men,” Rose interprets. “He looks at you and sees you with me, and suddenly you’re not the kind of man he’s afraid of. What do you
think
it means?”

“Oh,” Rafferty says. Even after more than eighteen months in Bangkok, he still fails to see things that are obvious to Rose. In her twenty-three years, she has been a village child, a grade-school student, a Patpong go-go dancer and prostitute, and now a hopeful businesswoman who is trying to set up an apartment-cleaning service while refusing support from the foreigner—Rafferty—who loves her. “But he’s just a kid.” Even as he says the words, he knows how stupid they are.

“There’s something between them.” Rose is watching the two children, who are whispering now, Miaow’s shiny-clean hair next to Superman’s snarled thatch. “She’s deferring to him.”

As Rafferty follows Rose’s eyes, he can see that Miaow has curled her spine and drawn in her head to make herself shorter. He can hear only snatches of what she is saying, but she has pitched her voice slightly higher, emphasizing its girlishness. The charade puzzles him; she has plucked the boy from the street, but she is apologizing for it, exaggerating the boy’s dominance.

The crowd of pedestrians parts momentarily, and Rafferty spots a boy to their right. Since Miaow came into his life, he sees street children everywhere, but they have multiplied since the tsunami ravaged Phuket and Phang Nga three months earlier, a wave of children washed all the way to Bangkok, leaving behind an island many Thais believe is now haunted by scores of anguished ghosts. The boy to their
right wears the threadbare, oversize uniform of the street, stained as brown as a used tea bag. He sags against a building as though it is the only thing holding him up. Rafferty watches as the child notices Miaow—as always, he wonders, does this child know her?—and sees him look beyond her to Superman. The boy straightens instantly, a single, electrified movement, and cranes his head forward, narrowing his eyes. Then, very slowly, he begins to walk, parallel with Miaow’s path, his eyes glued to Superman. When Superman senses the scrutiny and glances over, the boy freezes. Then he turns and runs as though all of Phuket’s ghosts are after him.

With profound conviction, Rafferty says, “Oh, shit.”

“He’s terrified,” Rose says. She turns to watch the boy run. “What are you getting us into?”

Patpong Road opens up on their right, the neon signs above the bars just beginning to snap on. The young women who dance in the clubs push their way up the street in jeans and loose T-shirts, their black hair wet and gleaming. “Get them home,” he says. “I’ll go to the pharmacy here and pick up the stuff. Can you think of anything else we’ll need?”

“Shirt and pants,” she says, sizing the boy up. “Size ten.” She gives Patpong an unfriendly glance; she was once the top girl at the King’s Castle bar, probably the most famous of them all. “Blue,” she adds, glancing back at the children.

Above them the sign for yet another bar blooms bright pink with a sizzle of juice. “Only shopping, right?” Three girls shoulder by them, laughing their way to work, two of them giving Rafferty a practiced eye. “No bars.”

“Of course,” Rafferty says. “No bars.” He gazes at Superman’s bruised and sullen face, and the child turns away to stare into the traffic.

“On the other hand,” Rose says, “the bars might be safer than this boy.”