A Nail Through the Heart (8 page)

T
he maid’s address is the Bangkok Bank Building,” Rafferty says into the cell phone. He has ducked into the bank’s deep doorway to escape the setting sun’s final attempt to incinerate the city before giving up for the night.

“Maybe she sleeps with her money,” Arthit says.

“And the telephone number is not in service.”

“Careful girl.” Arthit covers the mouthpiece and says something to someone else. “I’m back,” he says. “Maybe she was planning to steal something and disappear.”

“And maybe she got caught,” Rafferty says. “And overreacted.”

“And maybe it has nothing to do with anything. Maybe she was living on the street. By the way, thanks for the photo. I faxed it down there and asked a couple of guys to check the hospitals and compare it with the boards.” The “boards,” at least one in every community struck by the tsunami, display the photos of corpses that have washed
ashore. A crowd gathers to study them each morning, all hoping to find, and hoping not to find, someone they love.

“So I don’t have to go down?” He tries to keep the relief out of his voice. It is after five o’clock now, and it has been a long day: the meeting with Clarissa Ulrich, Uncle Claus’s apartment and the Expat Bar, the scene with Miaow. The sneer from the woman at Bangkok Domestics.

“Probably not. There’s no Ulrich on the hospital lists, although it could be that he’s unconscious and didn’t have any ID. The picture will help there. He’s not on the computers of any of the hotels whose computers weren’t destroyed.”

“Your guys ought to show the picture to the people from the other hotels.”

“Really.” Arthit sounds like he’s rolling the word uphill. “We never would have thought of that. Where there
are
people from the other hotels, they’ll talk to them.”

“This guy is not a beach bunny, Arthit. He weighs three hundred pounds, and according to Clarissa, he burns faster than bacon. And you should see the apartment; it looks like he roomed with Ludwig of Bavaria. No one with taste like that goes outdoors if he can help it. And the only thing I can see him doing with a coconut palm is eating it.”

“So what’s your guess?”

“I think it has something to do with the maid. Her name is Tippawan Dangphai.”

“Dangphai,” Arthit says with the tone-deaf inflection of someone who is writing and talking at the same time. “Nickname?” All Thais have nicknames, a necessity in a country where a name can have six to eight syllables.

“Doughnut.”

Arthit sighs. “Sometimes I think we Thais carry this merriment thing too far. I’ll run the full name through the databases.” He clears his throat, usually a sign he has something to say and he’s not happy about it. “Poke, I’m afraid Clarissa did something stupid.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“She very politely called the two cops who had been taking her money and told them she wouldn’t be bothering them again.”

“And you criticize Western manners.” Despite the sun, the temperature suddenly seems to have dipped.

“She told them I’d put her in touch with someone.”

“Just ‘someone’?”

“Well, no. You impressed her quite a bit. She apparently went on at some length.”

“And they’re not happy.” Rafferty finds himself scanning the street.

“No,” Arthit says. “I think it’s accurate to say they’re not happy. They were already spending the rest of her money.”

“This is great, Arthit. The only people in Bangkok more dangerous than the crooks are the cops.”

“Some
of the cops.” Arthit can be touchy about police corruption.

“And these particular cops?”

Arthit says, “They’re in the
some
category.” Then he says, “I faxed their names and ID pictures to you. You might want to keep your eyes open.”

“Are you in any danger?”

“I laugh at danger,” Arthit says. “But lock your doors.”

OKAY. COPS AFTER
him. If anything happens to him, Arthit will know where to look. The thought is not particularly comforting.

As long as he’s standing in the shade, he pulls out the letter from Doughnut’s dreaded reference. He privately dismisses Arthit’s suggestion that Doughnut was a thief, because a woman who strikes terror into people, as her previous employer apparently does, would not be likely to recommend a servant with large pockets. He unfolds the photocopy and starts to punch the tiny buttons, then thinks better of it. One does not, he thinks, call a
formidable
woman, one who apparently has quintillions of baht, from a noisy sidewalk at 5:00
P.M.
It isn’t done. People don’t like to be disturbed at the end of the day,
especially when they’re rich and old and the evening’s pleasures beckon, whatever they may be. Cocktails, perhaps. Bloody Marys with real blood, if the woman at Bangkok Domestics’ description was accurate.

Much better to call from his apartment in the morning, at the start of a bright new day. The sun will be shining, the sky will be blue. The day will vibrate with promise. She’s just an aged lady, he thinks. She will refuse him nothing.

N
o,” says the man on the phone for the second time.

“I only need a few minutes,” Rafferty says for the third time.

“She will not see you.”

“Then I’ll talk to her on the phone.”

“Madame does not speak to people.” It is an older man’s voice, stiff as wire. They are speaking Thai. Rafferty has a vision of a sort of Southeast Asian Jeeves, tall and long-fingered and immaculately shaven, possibly even wearing a morning coat.

“You haven’t asked her.”

“I am not paid to ask her.”

“Then let me leave my number,” he says. “Tell her I’m investigating a disappearance here in Bangkok and I need ten minutes of her time. It’s important. I’m trying—”

“The number?” the man interrupts.

Rafferty recites his phone number and says, “My name is—” He is talking to a dial tone.

“Thanks for your time,” he says, hanging up.

The day is, inevitably, bright and hot, with so much light pouring through the glass door that Rafferty has to squint against it. Rose has trudged off somewhere, visibly depressed by the failure of yesterday’s potential clients to hire any of the faded flowers in her labor pool. Her despondence worries him. He suspects she has been lending the women small amounts of money to keep them from going back to the bars.

She should know better
, he thinks, and then mentally slaps himself in the face. Like
he
knows better. Like he’s a shining example of knowing better than to try to help people who probably can’t be helped.

For example, Superman.

The events of the previous evening, welcoming Superman provisionally into the family, were bad enough to make Rafferty wish he could reformat his memory. He was up half the night trying to think of something,
anything
, he could do with the boy that won’t break Miaow’s heart.

AFTER MIAOW BROUGHT
him up from the garage, the boy had greeted without visible enthusiasm the news that he could stay with them. He had gazed at Rafferty through the good eye and the swollen eye as though Rafferty were a dirty window with nothing interesting on the other side. When Rafferty had finished his little speech, Superman had waited to see whether there was going to be more talk, then turned and stalked down the hallway to Miaow’s room.

Rafferty hadn’t said anything, but his big, scrutable half-Anglo face evidently had, because Miaow said, “He’s happy.”

“Give him time,” Rose said.

“That’s exactly what I
am
giving him,” Rafferty had said. He thought that both the words and his tone had been reasonable, but he saw from their expressions that he was facing the familiar wall of female solidarity, rooted in some profoundly obvious emotional reality that was completely invisible to him.

“You have to give it from your heart,” Rose said.

Rafferty said, “I’m having trouble getting my chest open.”

That exchange had been the high point of the evening. It had been, on the whole, an evening to be forgotten as quickly and completely as possible.

“If I were Claus Ulrich,” Rafferty asks himself aloud, “where would I be?” He crosses to his desk and idly opens and closes the screen on his laptop. “Or,” he amends, “if I were Claus Ulrich,
who
would I be?” He lifts the screen again.

As he sees it in the highly overrated light of morning, the errand he has undertaken can have five outcomes: (1) He can find Uncle Claus alive and make Clarissa happy. (2) He can find Uncle Claus dead and make her unhappy. (3) He can find an Uncle Claus who is radically different from the one she thinks she knows, and break her heart. (4) He can fail to find Uncle Claus at all and leave everything unresolved.

Or (5) Arthit’s renegade cops could kill him.

The dinner with Superman—the First Supper, as he’s beginning to think of it—had been well beyond grim.

The children had sat on one side of the table and the adults on the other. Rose had talked enough for four, and Miaow had eaten enough for two. The boy, for the most part, had stared at his food as though he expected it to start wriggling on the dish. At one point Miaow had broken a spring roll in half and reached over and put it in his mouth, and he had removed it and dropped it on her plate as though it were a stone. Rafferty had fought the impulse to pull the cloth off the table, dishes and all.

“You have to eat something,” he finally said. “Rose cooked this food for us, and you have to eat something.”

The boy had looked at Rafferty for a good count of ten and picked up the half a spring roll and put it in his mouth. Then he had chewed it, noisily and deliberately, for at least five minutes. He had swallowed it three times. Then he pushed his chair from the table and sauntered down the hallway to Miaow’s room.

This performance had been followed by a long silence. Rose ate as
though nothing had happened. Rafferty counted to a hundred. Miaow stared at her lap.

“He wants to show you he won’t eat much,” she finally said.

“He’s smoking
yaa baa
,” Rafferty replied.

“He’s just confused,” Rose said placidly, helping herself to some more noodles. “He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, and that makes him angry. He needs time.”

“Not smoking,” Miaow said very softly.

“How do you know?” Rafferty had asked.

“Not smoking,” Miaow repeated more loudly.

“Fine,” Rafferty retreated. “He’s not smoking. Tell him he has to eat, Miaow. It’s the only way I’m going to know.”

“He’s not smoking,” Rose said. “He just doesn’t know what he feels.”

And they left it there. The boy had slept on the couch in the living room, with Rafferty rejecting Miaow’s repeated offer to give him the top level of her bunk bed, and when Rafferty woke up, he was gone. Rafferty secretly hopes he won’t return.

He has started a game of solitaire on the computer when the phone rings.

“Poke,” Arthit says. “Do you have a pencil?”

“Of course,” he says. “I’m a writer.”

“While you try to find one,” Arthit says, “here’s an update. No results on the photograph yet in either Phuket or Phang Nga. There are four guys working on it now, but there are a lot of people to talk to. So far, though, no one recognizes him either alive or dead.”

Rafferty is opening and closing drawers. “That’s because he wasn’t down there.”

“Maybe not. Got the pencil yet?”

“Yeah, yeah.” The one that has come to hand is dimpled with the tooth marks Rose always puts into it when she subtracts her assets, little indentations of anxiety.

“Here comes the first part of your favor: 555–0475. That’s Hank Morrison’s number. Do you know Hank?”

“Pilot or something. Runs that school for street kids.”

“He puts the kids through a few years of basic schooling,” Arthit says. “He—what’s the word?—
socializes
them. You know, teaches them not to kill each other over who gets the first helping of noodles. And then he arranges their adoption. I’ve told him to expect your call.”

“Adoption? You mean, like
adoption
?”

“Have some coffee,” Arthit says sympathetically. “Crank up those verbal skills, then give him a call. And keep working on Claus Ulrich.”

Rafferty is already dialing when he realizes he hung up on Arthit without saying good-bye. The phone feels slick. His palms are sweating.

After two rings the telephone is picked up. Nobody says anything, but Rafferty can hear the shrieks of what sound like a million children on a roller coaster. “Hello?” Rafferty says. The squeals rise in pitch as the roller coaster, or whatever it is, reaches the top of its arc. “Hello?”

On the other end of the line, somebody laughs. From the sound of the laugh, its possessor is less than three feet tall and easily amused.

“Is Hank there? Khun Hank, is he there?” Rafferty asks in Thai.

After a deliberative pause, the person on the other end says, “Yes,” and hangs up.

Rafferty counts to twenty to give the child time to become interested in something else and wander away, and then he dials again. Four rings this time, and then a deep male voice says, “Hello.”

“Hank Morrison? This is Poke Rafferty.”

“Hey, Poke. Did you just call?”

“Sort of.”

“Natalee said someone had called. She’s got the basic idea, but she’s a little shaky on the drill.”

“You’re training them early,” Rafferty says.

“You don’t have to train them at all. They fight to help out. One thing about kids, they like to feel useful.”

“Hank, I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

“This is about what Arthit mentioned.”

“Actually, the first thing is business.”

“Fire away. Listen, if you hear me drop the phone suddenly, hang
on. It just means I’m intervening in one of the day’s near-death situations. We’ve got prospective adoptive parents coming through today, and it gets the kids kind of worked up.”

“Okay, the business. I’m looking for a guy as a favor for Arthit. He’s supposed to be active with kids here. Do you know anyone named Claus Ulrich?”

“Claus…”

“Ulrich.”

“Can’t say I do. What organization does he work with?”

“I have no idea.”

“Might help if you could find out. But I’ve never heard of him, and I think I know most of the folks who are really doing something. Maybe he’s an angel.”

“An angel?”

“You know—doesn’t do the work but gives the money. Is he well-off?”

“Seems to be.”

“Okay, I’ll ask around and get back to you. Now, what about the child Arthit mentioned? How old?”

“She’s eight,” Rafferty says. “I think.”

“A little girl,” Hank says carefully.

“That’s right, Hank,” Rafferty says, suddenly angry. “An eight-year-old female is often called a little girl.”

“Sorry, Poke. It’s more…complicated with girls. How did you get involved with her?”

“I met her in Patpong, selling gum. She didn’t have a place to live, and I didn’t want her on the street. I put her in a rented room for a while, and I set her up in one of the international schools. After a while I cleared out my office, here in the apartment, and she moved in.”

Morrison clears his throat. “Is she still in school?”

“Yes, and she’s doing great.”

“Poke, what did you tell the school about her? What have you been telling people in general?”

“Not much. It doesn’t come up that often, actually. I have a long-time girlfriend who’s here a lot, and that sort of takes some of the
curse off. When someone asks—at the school, for example—I say she’s my adopted daughter.”

“Mmmm,” Morrison says. “You want to be careful with this.”

“I know. I worry about it.” The person he worries most about is one of the people who lives on his floor, a Mrs. Pongsiri. A regal-looking lady of a certain age who works very peculiar hours, leaving in the afternoon and coming home late at night, Mrs. Pongsiri never misses an opportunity to gaze speculatively at Miaow. She has demonstrated a vast repertoire of ways to purse her lips. Since she is essentially the central switchboard for the apartment house’s gossip network, her interest is disconcerting.

“You
should
worry about it. And for the meantime you want to avoid rubbing people’s noses in it. What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

“Rose.”

“Well, it would be a good idea to take Rose along when the two of you go out. This is a serious relationship?”

“I’d marry her in a minute. She’s the one with reservations.”

“Well, good for her. Marriage is supposed to be for life. But adoption
really
is.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s fine. I mean, I want to see her grow up and everything, while I get old, just like I’m supposed to. I want her to have some kind of life. She’s an amazing kid, Hank.”

“They’re all amazing,” Morrison says. “That’s the hard part.”

“So, then, what? I mean, what do I do?”

“Are her parents dead?”

“She doesn’t know. She’s been on the streets practically her whole life.”

“That makes it harder. Normally, to qualify for adoption you need to be able to demonstrate either that both parents are dead or that they’ve consented to the deal.”

Rafferty emits three frustrated little pops of breath. “Well, we can’t do that.”

“Probably not the end of the world.” Morrison puts a hand over the phone and calls out to someone, using a tone that has a lot of military starch in it. “Listen, don’t take this wrong, Poke. Arthit says
you’re a good guy. But before I can do anything at all for you, I have to see you and her together. And I have to spend time with her alone. At least a couple of hours.”

“Do you really think you can do something for us?”

“It’s possible. But one thing at a time. Before we can do anything, I have to talk to both of you.”

Rafferty is up and pacing the room. He feels light enough to float. “Jesus, Hank. Thank you.”

“I’ll need some money. The paperwork isn’t cheap.”

“How much?”

“The low thousands.”

“Is that all?” Rafferty asks, and then realizes that his total net worth at the moment can be placed in the very low thousands, especially with the drain of Rose’s business. And Miaow’s school claims a chunk every month, too.

“That’s it. But don’t get your hopes up too fast. It’s a bumpy track. We’ll talk in a day or so.”

“Hank, one more thing. There’s another kid.”

“Poke, are you writing books or doing day care?”

“This is a boy, about ten. He took care of my little girl for a few years, starting when she was four or five, and now she’s trying to return the favor.”

“What’s his problem? Because there is one. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Amphetamines,” Rafferty says. “And violence.”

“What kind of violence?”

“Ganging up on pedos who like little boys, which I can live with, actually. Stealing. And biting.”

“Oh, good Lord, Poke,” Hank says, “we’re not talking about Superman, are we?”

“Um…” Rafferty says.

“Because if we are, forget him. He can’t be helped. I know that sounds cold, but I learned early on that you have to conserve your strength. There are a lot of kids to take care of, and you can’t burn yourself out on one. That boy is a black hole.”