For the Dead (21 page)

“Boo, Boo,” Chalee says, grabbing his wrist and practically swinging from it.

Dok says, “She
said
something.”

“What?”

“Not Thai,” Chalee says. “Sounded like—” She closes her eyes to concentrate, but then she opens them again and waves Dok to her. When he’s next to her, she whispers in his ear. Dok screws up his face, his rat-teeth gleaming in the sun, and shakes his head. Chalee stamps her foot impatiently and whispers again into Dok’s ear, and Dok gives her a huge smile.

Proudly, Chalee says to Boo, “She said,
Poke
.”

A
NDREW
’
S FATHER WEARS
slacks and a long-sleeve knit shirt, buttoned almost to the neck, and he manages to make it look like a uniform. His receding hair is combed back and wet-looking. Even standing in Poke’s doorway, he has the bearing of a soldier.

His face is uncomfortably stiff. Poke thinks, with a sinking feeling,
He’s embarrassed
.

“Mr. Nguyen.” He steps aside without actually inviting Nguyen in, and after an awkward moment, Nguyen comes through the door.

He lets his eyes travel over the living room, tiny compared to the Nguyen apartment. His gaze pauses at the enormous television set, which in Poke’s class-conscious imagination, screams
nouveau riche
, and halts when it settles on Rose, immaculate on the couch in a long-sleeve coral shirt that gives her the blush of a nectarine.

Nguyen bows slightly. “Mrs. Rafferty.”

Rose says, to Poke, “Will this take long?” From Rose, that’s breathtakingly rude.

Small red spots bloom on Nguyen’s cheekbones.

“Will it?” Rafferty asks.

“I wanted to apologize—” Nguyen begins.

“Ahh, well, if
that’s
why you’re here, let’s get the person you owe the apology to.” He raises his voice. “Miaow. Andrew’s father is here.”

They hear her bedroom door open, and a moment later she’s standing at the end of the hallway. Her hands are clapped to her sides like those of someone standing at attention. Her lips are pressed together so tightly they look like they’ve been sewn shut, and the tilt of her head has something imperious in it, but her eyes are the eyes of someone expecting a slap.

“I’m here to say I’m sorry,” Nguyen says. “You have to believe that I admire your courage, young lady, and that I know—because Andrew
has made certain that I know—that you saved him from something dangerous yesterday.” He stops, looking like he’s lost his place.

The line of Miaow’s mouth hardens in a way that doesn’t suggest that she appreciates the sentiment, but her eyes don’t waver.

“I spoke to you yesterday in a way I shouldn’t have. I owed you thanks, not rudeness. I apologize for that.”

Miaow says, “But.”

Nguyen holds her gaze. Miaow’s head still tilts upward as the silence stretches out, but then she brings up her right palm, brusquely wipes her eyes with it, and turns and goes back down the hallway.

Rafferty hears the phone in her bedroom play the final chord of “A Day in the Life.” Miaow accelerates, but not much, and closes the door behind her.

Rafferty and Nguyen look down the hallway. Rose leans her head back against the wall behind the couch and closes her eyes.

Rafferty says, “But.”

Nguyen says, “Andrew is my only child. His future is more important to me than my own.” He puts his hands in his pockets and immediately takes them out again. “He needs to be around girls who are—”

“Upper class,” Rafferty suggests.

“Vietnamese,” Nguyen says.

“Right,” Rafferty says. “Well, now that you’ve soothed your conscience—”

“I’m an only son,” Nguyen says. “Andrew is an only son. That’s a burden for a Vietnamese family, especially one like mine. If he had an older brother, if—if—” He waves the thought away. “And we’re only going to be stationed in Bangkok one more year … They’d have to separate then, anyway. It’s probably better that they say goodbye now, before they grow—fonder of each other. It could be very difficult for both of them, if they—”

Rafferty jumps at the
bang
of the door to Miaow’s room being thrown open, hard enough for the knob to punch a hole in the wall.

Miaow marches into the living room and past Nguyen to the door as though the room were empty. She opens the front door.

Rafferty says, “Where are you going?”

She says, “Somewhere else,” and slams the door behind her.

Rose says to Nguyen, “Are you finished?”

He says, “I
am
sorry.”

“Wait,” Rose says. “Only one elevator is working. She doesn’t want to be with you.”

In the bedroom, Rose’s phone begins to ring. She gets up, and Nguyen’s eyes follow her as she leaves the room.

“Count of five,” Rafferty says. “One. Two.” He goes to the front door. “Three. Four.” On “Five,” he pulls the door open, looks out, and says, “Coast clear. Goodbye.”

Nguyen nods and goes out into the hallway, and when Rafferty closes the door and turns around, he sees Rose, her hands tight on the phone.

“It’s my mother,” she says. “I haven’t talked to her today, so she didn’t know we weren’t going to tell Miaow about the baby.”

Rafferty says, “Oh, no.”

“She called just now to ask Miaow if she was excited about being an older sister. Miaow hung up on her.”

Rafferty says, “Where would she go?” With a cold spasm of panic, he remembers Arthit saying to keep her home on Sunday, and on the kitchen counter, his phone rings.

“She could be anywhere in Bangkok,” Rose says. “You’d better get that,” and Rafferty skids across the floor to pick it up. It says ARTHIT.

“I think we need to talk,” Arthit says. “They’re sending me out of Bangkok, and I haven’t heard anything new about the phone.”

“Arthit—” Poke begins, but the phone bleats to announce a call waiting. An unknown number. “I’ll call you right back.” He touches the screen to accept the call.

“Mr. Rafferty?” says a voice Poke hasn’t heard in more than two years. “This is Boo.”

V
IOLET SKY TO
the west. To the east, the hard white diamond of the evening star, punching a hole in the dark. The tatter of bats in flight. The same sky that’s hung above this swampy bend in the Chao Phraya River for hundreds of thousands of years.

On the curving banks of the river, a city that’s been the capital of Thailand under several names, most recently,
Krung Thep Maha Nakon
, known to the world as Bangkok. Like the ever-expanding boundaries of the town, the city’s history has been fluid and often directed by its sheer, obliging adaptability; the name
Bangkok
has no clear meaning in Thai and may have been adopted formally as the city’s name simply as a convenience for the foreigners who misheard and mispronounced one of the town’s colloquial names,
Bang ko
. The town exploded in an influx of foreign money in the 1980s, and exploded again more recently as poverty and the breakdown of community structures in the countryside have swelled the population to an estimated ten million, and as many as twelve million at the peak of the workday.

Ten to twelve million people. A thousand miles of sidewalk beneath the bat-specked, purpling sky. One girl down there somewhere.

R
AFFERTY AND
R
OSE
are in a cab, heading for Arthit’s house, when Rose says, “Call Boo back now. If anybody can find her, he can.”

Rafferty says, “I’m not thinking clearly,” and hits
redial
.

W
HEN
A
RTHIT OPENS
the door, Rose hugs him so hard he huffs like someone who’s been hit in the stomach. She lets go of him and steps back, blinking tears away. Rafferty throws an arm around Arthit’s shoulders, and Arthit turns to lead them into the house.

“Boo might be coming, too,” Rafferty says, and then they’re in the living room, and in its dead center, standing very straight, with her hands crossed formally in front of her, is Anna. She’s wearing business clothes: a jacket and matching slacks, every crease sharp, and Rafferty understands immediately that she’s dressed up for this meeting. She looks at Arthit as though seeking reassurance and then blinks heavily and directs her eyes to Poke.

But Rose takes control of the moment, saying, in Thai, “Hello. I’m Rose.” She looks around the room and says, “You’ve made this room even more beautiful.”

Anna, her eyes sharp with the embarrassment of speaking aloud, says, “Thank you.”

Now that Rose has opened the door, Poke can say, more or less naturally, “Hello, Anna.”

Anna keeps her hands in front of her and makes a very small bow, almost Japanese-style, from the waist, and then opens her hands and lifts them in a
wai
, just beneath her chin. Rafferty sees it as a request for forgiveness, or at the least as a plea for him to pretend forgiveness.

“We’re all friends,” he says. “It’s good to see you.”

The four of them stand there for a moment, Arthit shifting a bit, and Rose says, to Anna, “Our daughter has run away.” Her tone is light enough to draw a glance from Rafferty.

“She’s been through a lot,” Rafferty says.

Anna reaches into the pocket of her jacket and pulls out the
familiar pad with the blue cards, writes quickly, and shows it to Rose. My
son is difficult, too
. Then she says aloud. “Please. Sit down.”

“How old?” Rose asks.

Anna practices the word silently once, lips only, and then says, “Twelve.”

“Then you know all about it. I don’t want to trouble you, but I know Poke would like some coffee,” Rose says. “Poke always wants coffee. Maybe I could help you?” She loops an elbow under Anna’s arm and more or less hauls her into the kitchen. A moment later, Rafferty hears Anna laugh.

“Rose is surprisingly light-hearted,” Rafferty says.

“You have no idea how she’s feeling,” Arthit says. “Right now, she’s being an angel and making friends with Anna.”

“Still, she’s pretty chipper, considering what we just went through.” He tells Arthit about Nguyen’s visit and the call from Rose’s mother. “I suppose I should be grateful Miaow just left, instead of jumping off the balcony.”

Arthit sits on the couch and waits for Rafferty to settle himself into his usual chair, and then he says, “I don’t know how I can help you. I mean, I could give you the children-are-resilient speech, but I have no idea how resilient children are or aren’t.”

“Well, I’m not really looking for parental guidance.”

“So here’s the other bad news. I don’t think we should involve the cops.”

“Really,” Rafferty says, his heart sinking at Arthit’s tone. “Tell me about that.”

“Things feel bad.” Arthit puts his hands palm-to-palm and squeezes them between his thighs, rocking forward a little as though he’s cold. “Thanom made a big deal out of pulling me into what was supposed to be a tight little circle of people who would be involved in this case. And now he’s sending me hours away to look into the murders the people who killed Sawat are supposedly avenging.”

“Maybe he’s just worried that it’ll leak if you’re doing it closer to home.”

“No one has seen the surveillance tapes. They’ve vanished. That means that almost nobody knows what those combinations of murdered women and children mean. I could search for them all day long, and not even someone who looked over my shoulder would know what I was working on. And now he’s quarantined Andrew’s iPhone, too.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that it’s essentially vanished, just like the tapes. This isn’t about keeping the investigation tight, Poke, it’s about controlling it. And from the moment I learned it was Sawat who’d been killed, I’ve been waiting for Thanom to get yanked off the case.”

“Why?”

“Because he was Sawat’s and Thongchai’s boss. And they were both dirty. So how does it look from outside that Thanom’s been put in charge of the investigation?”

“Like a fix.”

“Doesn’t it.” Arthit sits back, closes his eyes, and massages the bridge of his short, wide nose. “How much do you know about what Sawat was pulling?”