For the Dead (38 page)

“
This
number,” Clemente says, putting a tangerine-colored fingernail on the page, next to Anand’s brown finger. “This is—or could be—a badge number. Right number of digits, right place for the dash. If the man was pretending to be the Colonel, he would have presented a police ID card.”

“Is that your number, Colonel?” Arthit asks.

“Not even close.” Thanom swipes his nose with his index finger and sniffs. “Where’s the picture? These cards have pictures.”

“Not encoded on the strip,” Clemente says. “But—”

“Then what fucking good is it?” Thanom says.

“
But
,” Clemente says, “I can access this on the police database, and the picture should be part of the record. They use those records to print the cards.”

Thanom says, “You mean, you think the card is real?”

“Sure, it is,” Rafferty says. “What could be easier for someone in Ton’s position? They probably changed one character in your name, or your birth date, and assigned the card an unused number. They knew the bank would run the strip to verify the card. If it bounced, there’d be no transaction.”

“Shall I?” Clemente says. She gets up, and Arthit and Rafferty get up, too. After a moment, during which he seems to be translating what he’s just heard, Thanom pushes his chair back. He has to put a hand on the table to rise.

Anand gets up, too. “Can I come?”

Arthit says, “Could we stop you?”

About three minutes later, Clemente says, “Here he is. This guy is everywhere.”

In a nice, clear, recent photo, full face, Ton’s son-in-law, Jurak, looks out at them.

Rafferty says to Arthit, “How would you feel about sending Anand, if he’s willing to go, and two or three other uniformed cops to pick
Khun
Jurak up and put him on ice somewhere? Some minor station where they can register him under a fictitious name for a few hours? Get him into an interrogation room, show him this picture and the shot from the phone. I don’t think he’ll have much fight in him.”

“How would I feel?” Arthit says. “I’d feel constructive. I’d feel decisive. I’d feel like a cop for the first time in days.”

To Thanom, Rafferty says, “The case just got a lot stronger. And we still don’t need proof.”

I
N THE HALLWAY
, he’s working his way through three or four possible ways to use the information to maximum effect and simultaneously congratulating himself on getting out of harm’s way everyone who could be used as a pressure point against him. And then he stops in the middle of the hall.

There
is
a person out there who could be used as a pressure point: Treasure. The moment he has the thought, he relaxes because, he thinks, there’s no way for Ton or Ton’s men to know about her.

And then he realizes who he hasn’t seen since he came back to the embassy.

B
EING JAMMED INTO
the trunk of an Infiniti G-37 sports car is even less pleasant than he’d thought it would be. He’s bent so sharply, in so many places, he feels like a clothes hanger. The air is unpleasantly warm and as dark as a torturer’s soul.

But it’s the smallest car in the embassy compound, and it seemed to him, during the brief and frantic time he had to think about it—after Boo failed to answer two panicked calls—that the trunk of a weensy car would be less suspicious than a big one. From the moment he learned that Anna had been driven to Klong Toey to the time they closed the trunk on him and the car wheeled through the gates and onto the street, it’s been less than twenty minutes, which makes it about 5:30.

“We’ve got one,” the driver says. He and Rafferty are connected by cell phone.

“Well, I’m glad. I’d feel like an idiot, going through all this with nobody following us. Let me know when the first stop is coming up.”

“Just a minute or two. I’ll be turning into a
soi
to park.”

“Got it.” The idea, if it even qualifies as an idea, is for the driver to run several very ordinary, very boring errands, leaving the car empty so the followers can get up close and confirm that no one is cowering in the backseat. The hope is that the followers will go away. If they don’t, two other cars wait behind the embassy gate, engines running, to supply a diversion.

“Office supply store,” the driver announces, and the car swerves into its turn. A moment later there’s a gristly grinding of gears as the driver botches the shift into reverse, and they stop. “They just went past,” he says, and the door opens, the car rises as the man gets out, and the door slams. The car makes the little
boop
that announces it’s locked.

The driver’s shoes scuff the asphalt. Rafferty settles in and waits, doubting every decision he’s made in the past few hours. How could he have forgotten about Treasure? Why hadn’t he kept tabs on Anna?

All the questions disappear as he hears the footsteps. Someone tries the driver’s door, and then there’s a line of light around the back of the fold-down seat he’ll use to get out of the trunk. Someone’s using a flashlight.

“It’s empty,” a man says in Thai, probably into a phone. “Driver went into that Staples a kilometer from the embassy. Left the car at the curb.” There’s a pause, and the man says in response to someone, “Okay, whatever you want.” The footsteps recede and then stop abruptly, and Rafferty figures the man is standing there, watching the car, and then there are more footsteps, fading away this time.

The next errand is a liquor store, and this time the footsteps stop some distance from the car, and Rafferty imagines the man hanging back and waiting to see whether anyone emerges from the trunk. The next thing he hears is the driver, coming back.

“The one who just left was keeping an eye on the car,” the driver says as he starts the engine. “There’s another one driving.”

“Well, let’s see what happens now.”

“If this stop doesn’t do it,” the driver says, “nothing will.”

They park relatively close to their destination, and Rafferty can smell hot fat and charred meat, smells that bring back Lancaster fast-food joints when he was a kid, spreading their plume of cooking oil through the clean desert air. Almost immediately after the driver leaves, there’s a scratching at the trunk, and a voice
says, “Locked. And there’s no keyhole. You have to open it from inside.”

Footsteps, and then another man says, “He’s getting takeout.”

“Did you hear that?” the first man says. “He’s getting hamburgers. Got to be for the Americans back at the embassy. This is a waste of—” Then he says, in English, “Yeah, okay.”

“What?” says the other man.

“He says fine, follow him back to the embassy and we can wait there again.”

“This is stupid,” the other man says. Then Rafferty hears nothing until the Infiniti’s driver says, “Scoot back as far as you can.” He manages to wriggle a few additional inches farther from the trunk lid. The driver pops the trunk and puts several big bags of food next to Rafferty, and then it’s dark again.

A moment later, the driver says, “Don’t eat any of that.”

“I’d like to get farther away from it. Are they still back there?”

“Don’t know. It must have looked like the trunk was empty.”

“Okay.” He feels a fizz of anxiety behind his breastbone. He’d hoped they would have peeled off by now. “Call Homer and tell him it’s showtime. Just put me on hold, I’m not going anywhere.”

A moment later, another call comes in on Rafferty’s phone, and Rafferty puts the driver on hold and says, “Yeah?”

“Where are you?” It’s Nguyen.

“Hard to tell, since I’m in the trunk, but we’ve finished at the fast-food place.”

“This is a bit labor-intensive. You’re tying up one of my drivers, and two more are racing their motors just inside the gate.”

“Those are my reserves.”

Nguyen says, “You spread yourself too thin.”

Rafferty can’t disagree, so he doesn’t argue. Instead, he resorts to explanation, “It’s about exposure. I need to make sure the kid I told you about is all right, because if she’s not, she could be used as a lever against me. Truth is, if I got a call saying someone has her, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Well, I’m not happy about it,” Nguyen says, “And you didn’t give me much time to argue. I could have sent men with you.”

“If I show up with an army, I’ll tip off Anna that I don’t trust her. What I need to do is to get to a point where I can walk in casually, with nobody following me, and say ‘Hi’ and figure out whether I’ve got to snatch the girl myself.” He puts Nguyen on hold and says to the driver, “Still back there?”

“Maybe not.”

“Well, keep your eye on the mirror in about sixty seconds. Nguyen is about to loose the lions.” To Nguyen, he says, “The cars that are at the gate, they’re SUVs with tinted windows, right?”

“That’s what you asked for.”

“Okay, good. Then, please, just tell them to leave. Out through the gate and into traffic, going as fast as they can.”

“And the people who are watching will follow them,” Nguyen says. “According to you.”

“And since the car I’m in is coming back with all this American food, I’m hoping they’ll call our tail off and put them into the game, too. And then I can get out of this damn trunk and flag a cab.”

“Very devious,” Nguyen says.

“Thank you. Please tell those cars to go.”

“Count to ten.” He closes the connection.

“They should be going any minute,” Rafferty says to the driver. “Keep your eye on the mirror.”

They hit a pothole, and Rafferty’s head emphatically meets the roof of the trunk. He’s still rubbing the sore spot when the driver says, “Four cars back, somebody just made a very fast turn into a
soi
.”

“If you had to bet, would you say yes or no?”

“Yes, but—”

“Okay. Turn into the next one-way
soi
and slow down. Keep your eyes on the mirror.”

The car sways as it turns left, and Rafferty pulls the lever that
folds down the backseat. In less than a minute, he’s curled up on the folded-down backs of the seats.

“No one back there,” the driver says.

“Find a parking space and turn off the interior light, and thanks for everything.”

With the car stopped, the driver says, “Still no one.”

Rafferty pushes the back of the passenger seat forward, opens the door, and a moment later he’s sprinting up the sidewalk.

H
E GETS OUT
of the cab half a block from the alley. The moon is down, and in this run-down part of the city, with few streetlights and with the vast, unilluminated expanse of the river just blocks away, the darkness seems as concentrated as smoke.

He waits at the alley’s mouth, listening. The alley curves to the left, so he can’t see Boo’s building, only the walls of the structures on either side of the narrow passageway, blackened brick with small windows and a few old tin roofs. There are no lights in the windows. As dark as the street is, the alley is a different magnitude of darkness.

But, of course, that works both ways. If anyone is here, they won’t see him, either. It’ll be a blind date.

He chooses the wall on the right so he won’t be visible coming around the bend, and keeps a hand against the filthy brick as he moves. Involuntarily he thinks of Miaow, at four and five, negotiating alleyways like this, barefoot, alone, with no way of knowing what was waiting a few steps ahead. Not only Miaow: Boo, Chalee, Dok, and all of Boo’s charges. Thinks of Andrew, smart, coddled Andrew, hearing Miaow’s story for the first time and bursting into tears.

Thinks of Treasure, flaming with fever, collapsed in an alley like this one for Dok and Chalee to find. Chalee, running from her suicide-stained family to these alleys. Dok, small for his age and defenseless, on whatever miserable path led him to Boo’s shelter.

At the turn, he pauses. For all he knows, there’s a crowd waiting
for him around the bend. He presses himself against the wall to reduce his profile and takes the curve slowly, studying, as it comes into view, each slice of the dead end containing Boo’s building. The building plugs the alley except for a supernaturally dark strip to the left, just wide enough to allow two people walking abreast to reach the next street.

Only one panel of the double door into the boys’ dormitory floor is open. The same dismal fluorescents are dispensing their miserly, arctic light. No figures in the doorway.

Just stroll in casually, someone who drops by every day. So he takes a last look around and walks toward the building as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Hi, how you doing, and what a surprise, Anna, to see you here.

He takes the two steps up and into the big room. Two of the cots are occupied by boys, the same newcomers as the night before, still dirty, but now on adjoining cots. When he comes in, their eyes snap to him, but until the moment they became aware of him, both had been looking to his left, toward the corner that houses Boo’s impromptu office.

He turns, too, and sees five children, boys and girls, pressed into and around the gap between the partitions, looking into the office. A moment later, he hears laughter—eight or ten kids by the sound of it. The children with their backs to him join in.

It takes him a few seconds to carve a passage, very gently, between the children at the door, smelling the essence of kids, the scent of hair and skin in need of a washing: the first smell he associated with Miaow. As the last children give way to let him by, he leans forward and looks into the room.

There are now nine chairs, both the metal ones and the rickety wooden ones Boo had been using. They’re all occupied; a handful of kids Rafferty hasn’t seen before, plus Boo and Chalee. In the front row is the boy with the scratches running down his face. Sitting in a corner, on Boo’s one good chair with her two friends between her and the rest of the room, is Treasure.

She’s almost smiling.

The laughter ceases the instant he comes in, and Anna, at the front of the room with Boo’s whiteboard behind, stops writing and turns to him. She communicates something in sign language, her hands flying, and then in her flat, uninflected voice, says, “We have a visitor.”