A Nail Through the Heart (7 page)

M
iaow sits bolt upright as a key turns in the lock. The T-shirt is twisted between her clenched hands, her knuckles pale in the dark skin.

Rose comes in with four large bottles of drinking water clutched to her chest. She stops, looking from Rafferty to Miaow and back again. “One minute,” she says in English. “I put water and go.”

“No,” Miaow says, looking up at her. “I want to tell you, too.”

Rose colors with pleasure. “She likes us both today,” she says, and Miaow produces a low-wattage smile. “Why is your friend downstairs?”

“Downstairs where?” Rafferty asks.

“In the garage,” Rose says in Thai. “Asleep in somebody’s jeep, with his feet out the window.”

“He’s waiting,” Miaow says. “We’ve been in worse garages.”

“You and Superman?” Rose settles cross-legged on the floor with her back to the glass doors. The sunlight on her hair is dazzling, a knot of rainbows.

“When I was little,” Miaow says, “he found me and took me to a place where kids were making garlands. My first day I made thirty baht. Almost a dollar. I could eat. Boo—that was his name then,” she informs Rose—“Boo showed me a good place to sleep. There was a number hotel that was closed. We could sleep in the garage, behind the curtains. We were dry when it rained.” Number hotels, indispensable to Bangkok’s sexually furtive, have curtained garages to allow customers to get out unobserved.

“We started every day at five in the morning. We sold flowers until it was dark. Boo already had four kids with him. They were my first real friends, ever. When some older kids tried to chase us out of the garage, Boo took a big piece of wood with nails in one end and hurt two of them until they ran away.” She pauses for a moment to swallow. “He took care of us.

“I sold flowers every day for almost two years,” she says. She is looking straight in front of her, seeing her own life unspool like a film. “Boo was always there. One night a man called me to come to his car. When I got there, he reached out and grabbed my arm. He tried to pull me into the car, right through the window. Like a bag of rice. Boo ran up and bit the man’s arm. He wouldn’t let go. The man dropped me and drove off, with Boo hanging from his arm, biting him deeper and deeper. We were running behind, screaming for the man to stop. The man was screaming, too. When Boo let go, he fell on the road. He got up with blood all over his face and shirt and on his elbows and knees from where he fell. He was laughing.”

“Fierce heart,” Rose says.

Miaow falls silent. Rafferty can see her struggling with the next words. Rose pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse, looks at it, and drops it back in.

“Then some bigger boys showed him about
yaa baa
.”
Yaa baa
is a cheap, potent variant on amphetamine that is widely sold on the streets of Southeast Asia. “Then he wasn’t Boo anymore. People who smoke
yaa baa
don’t want to eat, so he stopped helping us find food. He got mad all the time. If you smiled at him wrong, he got mad. He hit one of the girls so hard her nose broke. He was sorry later, but we
were already afraid of him. One of the kids left, and then another one. After a while it was just me.

“He smoked it every morning. He smoked it all day. His hands shook. He screamed at people who didn’t buy a garland. Drivers closed their windows when he came up to them, and he spit on the windows. The police got him, and I didn’t see him for two weeks. When he came back from the monkey house, he took away the money I had made so he could buy
yaa baa
. I gave him the money when he asked, but he hit me anyway. Two days later he came again, and this time he cried and said he was sorry. He said he wasn’t going to smoke anymore. The next time I saw him, he was so crazy he didn’t know me.”

“He was how old then?” Rafferty asks.

“A year before I met you,” she says, working it out. “I was about seven. He was maybe nine or ten.”

Rafferty blows out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Miaow,” he says, “
yaa baa
is cheap, but if he was smoking so much, he had to have money. Where did—”

She stops him by raising the hand with the T-shirt in it, sees it, and drops it into her lap. “I’m telling you.” She squares her shoulders like someone who is about to pick up something heavy and sits forward.

“He joined a bunch of boys. They stole things. They smoked and ate pills and stole things. Maybe from a food vendor or even a beggar. Sometimes they beat people up. Ten or twelve boys, who would fight them? They were bigger than Boo, but he was smarter. So he had an idea. Those men—those men who want little boys. Before, they were around Soi 8, Soi 6, you know?”

“I know,” Rafferty says.

“So one of the boys would pretend he was going with the man and leave the door unlocked, and the others would all come into the room and hurt the man and take his money.” She looks from Rose to Rafferty. “That was when they started to call him Superman. Then I stopped hearing about him.”

“What happened to him?” Rafferty asks.

“He told me last night he went to Phuket.” Her eyes come up
to Rafferty’s, as if assessing the impact of what she is about to say. “Phuket is full of boys.”

It’s not Pattaya, Rafferty knows, but it’s bad enough. “What brought him back to Bangkok? The wave?”

“He won’t tell me,” Miaow says. “But he said it was worse than the wave.”

ROSE GETS UP
and crowds onto the couch beside Miaow and wraps her in dark, slender arms. Rafferty wants to hug her himself. She could have stopped long minutes ago, with the rescue from the man in the car. She could have left the boy a hero. She didn’t have to talk about the drugs. He knows what she wants, and she knows that every word she speaks makes it harder for him to say yes.

Miaow gently disengages herself and takes Rafferty’s hand in her right and Rose’s in her left. “After it happened, Boo ran back to Bangkok. He’s too old to beg now. He sleeps in the street. He says he hasn’t smoked any
yaa baa
in a long time.” She stops, breathing heavily, as though she’s just run up the stairs. She wraps her fingers around Rafferty’s thumb, gripping hard. “I want him to stay with us.”

“Oh, Miaow,” Rafferty says, although he knew it was coming.

“He can sleep in my room,” Miaow says, talking faster. Her hands are tight fists around theirs. “I’ll sleep on the floor. He can have half my allowance. He doesn’t eat much. He can wear my extra shoes. You already bought him a pair of pants and a shirt. I’ll make him stay in the other room, out of your way, when you’re home. He can help Rose.” She has squeezed her eyes shut with the effort of dredging up argument after argument and also, Rafferty thinks, because she is afraid to look at his face. He presses her hand to stop the flow.

“He can fix the faucet,” she says. “You always say you’ll fix it, but you never do. He can get that spot out of the carpet. He can—”

Rose says, “Miaow, did he tell you to ask Poke if he could stay with us?”

Miaow’s eyes open. She looks surprised. “No,” she says. “I don’t even know if he will.”

“It’s just not a good idea, Miaow,” Rafferty says. “I’ll try to find someplace else for him.”

She drums her feet against the sofa in frustration. “That will take weeks. And he won’t stay there. He needs to be here.” She looks at Rafferty with an expression he has never seen on her face before. “He needs
me
.” She brings her hands up, head high, in a prayerlike
wai
of supplication. “This time
he
needs
me
.”

Rafferty looks at Rose, and Rose looks at Rafferty. Rose closes her eyes, seceding from the discussion. Rafferty sits back, feeling the “No” rise up in him. And then he sees Miaow being lifted through the window of a car.

“Not for long,” he says. “One week, two weeks. Until he feels better and we can find a place for him to stay.”

“Really?” Miaow’s eyes fill half her face.

“Go get him,” Rafferty says. “Let’s see if we can talk him into it.”

M
r. Ulrich used us both times,” the lady behind the desk at Bangkok Domestics says in crisp English.

She is in her forties, clinging grimly to twenty-eight. Her face is white with powder, and her hair has been dyed blacker than a crow’s wing and lacquered into a rigid little wave in front that would probably shatter if touched. Her uniform is a frilly lavender junior-miss business suit that sports buttons the size of the door-knobs. It looks like something a small girl would wear on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

The wall behind her is a panorama of past glory. The anxious woman sitting at the desk is pictured in happier times with some of Bangkok’s most media-hungry socialites, faded snap after faded snap attesting to a once-thriving concern, supplying domestic help to the wives of the rich and—given the topsy-turvy world of Thai politics—the occasionally powerful.

But now she sits behind a scratched wooden desk in a room barely big enough to exhale into. On the desk, facing Rafferty, is a file,
topped by an official-looking form adorned with many impressive seals. One of them, Rafferty notices, is a United States Boy Scouts seal. In the blank for NAME, he reads: Miss Tippawan Dangphai.

“Doughnut,” Rafferty says. “Any idea why Doughnut?”

The woman barely shrugs. “Who knows? We have one girl nicknamed Pogo and two who call themselves Banana. Several years back we had one named Aspirin. Girls,” she says, as though this explains everything, which it probably does.

A passport-size black-and-white photo has been stapled to the form, next to a blank space where a fingerprint should be. Despite the frivolous nickname, Doughnut is not a particularly blithe-looking girl. She faces the camera glumly, with the attitude of one who knows the picture will not come out. The camera has been kind to the large, beautiful eyes, but it has muddied the dark skin of Isaan, in the northeast. Aside from the eyes, she is not a striking woman. Her face is as wide as it is long, her lower lip too full, and her nose has virtually no bridge to it. It is a face Rafferty sees everywhere in Bangkok, the face of refugees from Isaan’s broken villages and barren farms and no rain. On the basis of the photo, Doughnut would be difficult to pick out of a lineup.

“So the first maid stayed with him for ten years?”

“Or more.” She makes a patient show of checking a piece of paper in front of her. “Ten years and seven months.”

“And then he called you for a replacement.”

“Nine weeks ago.” She pauses. “As I said.”

He feels a flare of irritation. “So you did. And, as
I
said a minute ago, the man’s disappeared, and so has the maid. The maid you selected for him.” He sits back, watching her, and then puts out an index finger to move the Bangkok Domestics business card he took from Claus Ulrich’s desk. “The maid whose fingerprint you forgot to get.”

She straightens, and laces her fingers together on the desk. “Surely there’s no question that the maid had anything to do with it.”

“Isn’t there? Do you know where she is? Has she called to say she’s available for work again?”

The air-conditioning unit kicks out for a moment and then kicks
in with a depressed hum, something it does every forty seconds or so. However thriving it may once have been, the present Bangkok Domestics is a one-room operation, housed in a deteriorating four-story walk-up in the Pratunam area of the city. If the firm is profitable these days, it is saving a fortune on office space.

“Has she?” Rafferty asks again, since the woman has apparently slipped into a meditative trance, staring down at her file.

“No,” she says, without looking up. A furrow appears between her eyebrows, and a fine snow of face powder sifts down toward her lap.

“Right,” Rafferty says. “Tell me what the police will say. A missing
farang
, a missing Thai maid, who cleaned out her room before she left. A
farang
woman who’s come to Bangkok to try to find him. Tell me what the police will say.”

“The police are not involved,” she says, tidying the piles of paper on her desk.

“Not officially,” Rafferty says. He holds up his cell phone. “But perhaps they could be helpful.” The woman blinks twice. He begins to dial.

She tells him what he wants to know.

What Claus Ulrich requested—what he had requested both times from Bangkok Domestics—was a relatively young woman, in her early twenties, who could cook and clean and who had at least one strong reference.

“And she had a reference?” Rafferty asks.

A hesitation. The woman’s eyes drop to the file again but don’t focus on it. “Yes.”

“I want to talk to the reference.”

“Oh, no,” the woman says immediately. “Out of the question.”

“Not really,” Rafferty says. “Not when you think about it.”

She pushes her chair back from the desk very quickly, as though there might be a snake beneath it. “Please, no. This woman is a
very
good customer. Also—how can I put this?—she is not someone I would want to make angry. She is
formidable
.” The French pronunciation.

“She’ll get over it.”

The chair is already pressed against the wall so she can go no farther, but she flutters her hands at him, making him feel like a bird she is trying to shoo out a window. “Please, let me explain. There are people you meet who, you know at once, will make a good friend. I’m sure this has happened to you. And then, much more rarely, there are people who you know immediately will make a bad enemy.” The fluttering turns into a fanning gesture, as though her face is hot. “A
very
bad enemy.”

“This is a woman you met on the phone,” Rafferty says, “not on a battlefield.”

“I was called to her house,” the woman says, as though this will make it all clear. “I spent time with her. She is…” She searches the air above Rafferty’s head, looking for the words. “She is not easily forgettable.”

“Well, I’m sorry, because I’m going to have to talk to her. In fact, I need a photocopy of the reference she wrote.”

“This is very bad.” She is fanning herself again.

Rafferty smiles at her reassuringly. “Oh, come on. What can she do to you?”

“I don’t want to know,” the woman says.

Three minutes and one more mention of the police later, he has a copy of the letter of reference and a pair of fuchsia-colored sticky notes with Doughnut’s address and the number for the sole telephone in the village she left behind. Halfway to the door, he turns back.

“It might be a good idea to talk to Ulrich’s first maid, too.”

A pause, during which the woman seems to be framing her reply. “She’s dead,” she says at last. “Motorbike accident. That’s why he needed a new one.”

Rafferty takes another look at the cramped little office. “Where do your girls come from?”

She blinks surprise at the question. “The northeast, mostly.”

“Do you have any former go-go girls working for you?”

The heavily powdered upper lip rises a scornful quarter of an inch. Compared to the dead white of the powder, her teeth are yellow. “Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“They’re liars and thieves, every one of them. Liars and thieves.”

“Really,” Rafferty says, thinking of Rose’s roomful of scrubbed hopefuls and then the scrubbed room Doughnut had left behind. “We couldn’t have that, could we?”