For the Dead (6 page)

“A lot,” she says. Anticipating the next question, she answers with a lie. “He earned it
writing
, okay?” In an effort to change the subject, she says, “Poke says you think like a river and he thinks like a net.”

Andrew lags to watch a woman in a turquoise sari cooking strips of meat over a grill. “What does that mean?”

“People who think like a river,” she says, taking his upper arm and dragging him left, into a narrower alley, “go from A to D by way
of B and C. They think the world is organized one two three, this and then that and then
that
. People who think like a net believe that everything is connected to everything else, and they might go straight from A to L and then bounce off P before they get to D.”

Andrew’s lower lip emerges. “It sounds like pachinko. Random and disorderly, with a lot of wasted motion.”

“It’s just a different approach,” she says, feeling defensive.

“Like a bad movie.” He turns his head slowly, taking in his surroundings, obviously uncomfortable with what he sees. “Are there really phones here?”

“Just a little farther.”

He looks at his watch. “Because we’re going to be in trouble if the school calls our parents.”

“I’ll phone Mrs. Shin and tell her that I got sick on the bus but I’m okay now and we’ll be there in a little bit.”

“You can really think things up,” he says.

“It’s hard work,” she says, almost snapping. “And I’m doing it for you.”

“Right.”

They trot on for a few seconds. They’re in a section of alleyway that’s mostly snack food on skewers and flatbreads cooked over open coals. Here and there Miaow sees a glass display case that’s been hauled into the alley, full of small electronics—music players, earphones, GPS units—so she knows they’re going in the right direction.

He says, “What about stupid people?”

“What
about
stupid people?”

“What does your father—what does Poke—say about stupid people?”

“He says stupid people’s minds are like a big chest of drawers where the drawers change places all the time. Before they can get from A to C they have to search for B, and it’s never where they think they put it.”

“Huh.” He stops, and she stops with him. He blinks several
times, inhales, then exhales, and then says, “I need to talk to you about something.”

She looks at him, at his flushed cheeks, and a little worm of anxiety wriggles in her gut. “About?”

“The, umm, the play.”

The shift in topic catches her off-guard. They’d met in the school’s production of
The Tempest
, but Miaow hasn’t thought much about this year’s production. “The play?’

“You know,
Small Town
,” he says with the weighty patience of someone who’s been forced to state the obvious. “Are you going to try out?”

“No,” she says. “It’s a stupid play, a bunch of white people in a boring little town, not doing anything. There are no wizards or shipwrecks. Nobody in it is as cool as Ariel.”

He’s looking at his feet. “I guess not,” he says. He looks devastated.

Miaow strikes off down an alley to the left, and she hears his feet scuff as he catches up. He says, “But I like the things Julie says about, you know, dying and saying goodbye.”

“You like the things
Julie
says?”

“Sure,” he says. “You know.” He raises both arms, palms up, and declaims: “
One last look, please? Goodbye, all of you. Everyone I liked and didn’t like, the people I loved and the ones I fought with—over what? Nothing. The things I cried over. They were tiny
. Everything
was tiny, and big at the same time. Everything looks so small and ordinary from here and it lasts such a short time, and we make so much of it, and it’s all so beautiful. Are we wrong to think it’s ordinary, or are we wrong to think it’s beautiful?
” He blinks uncertainly, seeing her watching him open-mouthed, and concludes, “
But that’s right, isn’t it? It wasn’t until now that I saw how beautiful it is. Oh, for a chance to do it again, seeing it all this time. I’d see more of it that way, wouldn’t I?
Wouldn’t
I?
”

Miaow says, “You
learned
it.”

His cheeks two red hotspots, his eyes looking everywhere except at her, he says, “You could play Julie.”

“Never,” she says bitterly. “It’ll be someone
tall
. It’ll be Siri.” Siri Lindstrom, the school’s acknowledged beauty, played Miranda, the part all the girls had wanted, in
The Tempest
.

“But Siri can’t act,” Andrew says, and Miaow’s heart suddenly wells up. “She’s beautiful,” he adds as her heart shrinks back to normal size, “but she can barely walk without biting her tongue.
O brave new world
,” he parrots in a flat, uninflected treble voice, “
that has such creatures in it
.”

“Oh, Ferdinand,
Ferdinand
,” Miaow says in the same piping tone. She’s laughing, and Andrew joins in, making sure he doesn’t laugh longer than she does. She sobers and looks around, getting her bearings, and tugs on his shirt to tow him behind her. “Mrs. Shin’s not going to choose a short Julie.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Well, so have I, and it’s not going to happen.”

“
Listen
,” he says, stopping yet again. She stops beside him, slightly surprised. He’s rarely this assertive with her. He seems surprised, too. “The school, you know?”

He apparently expects an answer, so she says, “The school.”

“Well, about half the kids are Asians and about half of them aren’t, you know?”

She says, “Please stop saying
you know
.”

“Well, come on, look at us. Most of the Asian kids are short. Maybe half the school. And the other half—you know, most of the non-Asians—they’re tall. It’s not like a standard distribution, where there’d be a smooth gradient connecting the extremes—”

“Sorry?”

“
You
know, where you could line everybody up with the tallest kid on one end and the shortest on the other, and there’d be a smooth line running from high to low. Look, look, look.” He pulls a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Our class picture,” he says, not unfolding it. “What we have is a whole bunch of kids on the short end and a whole bunch of kids on the tall end with a big jump in the middle. Like a stair step. It’s an anomaly, because of
the racial mix.” He’s looking a little anxious. “The phenotypes,” he says, for clarification. “Nonstandard distribution of phenotypes.”

Miaow says, “Okay. So? So some of us are tall and some of us are—”

“Two productions,” Andrew says, pushing his way into her sentence. “I think Mrs. Shin should do two productions. A tall production and—”

Miaow gives him a big nod, says, “Oh,
sure
,” and starts walking again.

“—and a short production. Some of the best actors are short,” he says, a couple of steps behind her. “You’re short. I’m going to suggest it.”

“There’s no way she’ll—”

“I’m going to say it’ll be discrimination if she doesn’t do it.”

“
Discrimination
?” Miaow says. “Against who?”

“Whom. Asian kids, short kids. Preferential treatment for, uh, non-Asian tall kids. Look.” He unfolds the page, and Miaow finds herself looking at the class picture. A circle has been inscribed around the taller kids, with the words
BIG PARTS: MOSTLY ANGLO
, while the circle around the short kids says,
SMALL PARTS: MOSTLY ASIAN
. Beside the picture is a little circular graph, breaking out the heights by racial group.

It takes Miaow a second, and then she starts laughing. She looks at the crowd of people around them, all dark-skinned, and laughs again, “That’s totally
on
. They’re all crazy about discrimination now. You’re really smart, Andrew.”

“She’ll have to listen,” he says triumphantly. And then he adds, talking very fast, “And if you’ll try out for Julie, I’ll try out for Ned.” He stands there, blinking down at the pavement as the declaration echoes around them. He’s fidgeting from foot to foot.

She says, “You would?”

“I wouldn’t get it,” he says instantly. He uses an index finger to
blot moisture from his upper lip. “But we could rehearse together before we audition.”

“We could,” she says carefully. He’s given a
lot
of thought to this. Ned and Julie fall in love, but neither of them is going to mention that.

He says, “I already know some of it. Some of Ned’s lines, I mean. Not just your—I mean, Julie’s—lines.”

She leans toward him, as though she’s trying to peer in through his eyes, and then she smiles from ear to ear, and he sees the single dimple in her right cheek for only the third time since they met. She says, “I’ll talk to Mrs. Shin with you.”

“Okay,” Andrew says, swallowing between the syllables so it comes out, “Oh kay,” and Miaow laughs again and takes his arm.

“Let’s get your phone,” she says.

T
EN EIGHTEEN A.M.

An apartment house hallway, its sole occupant a silver-haired man in a gray janitorial outfit. He shuffles arthritically, each step an effort, burdened by a big, heavy, open-topped wooden box with a handle, jammed with a jumble of rags, bottles, and jars of cleaning solutions. When he gets to the elevator at the end of the hallway he shifts the case from one hand to the other, lets out a grunt that sounds more like bad temper than exertion, and turns and starts back up the corridor.

This is the third time he’s taken this walk since ten o’clock, counting the steps without even knowing he was doing it and then scurrying back in the other direction to be in position if the door should open, which it was supposed to have done at ten.

The man he’s waiting for has a reputation for being punctual, and the janitor is growing impatient. This is the last bit before he can leave Bangkok. He and his partners have done everything they’ve been paid to do, except this, and now the man in the apartment is late.

Of course, the man in the apartment has heard about Colonel Sawat’s death by now. He’s probably inside on the phone, sweating like a horse, trying to get answers from people at the station, and wondering what Colonel Sawat’s death has to do with him. Wondering whether it’s the obvious connection. Whether he’ll be next.

As the janitor trudges back to the doorway to the service stairs, the elevator groans. Someone coming up.

Moving much more quickly, the janitor covers in a few seconds the seven point three meters separating him from the service stairs, pushes open the swinging doors, and ducks through. He puts a shoulder against the left-hand door and cracks it open half an inch, his eye to the gap.

Two men in brown police uniforms get off. One of them wears dark glasses. He raises them to his forehead, revealing a hard face with a broad, humorous mouth. The cops talk for a second or two and then come down the hall, staying in the center. It’s a broad, thickly carpeted corridor with the elevator at one end and an angular floor-to-ceiling multicolored glass window at the other. The janitor will have the cold blue light from the window behind him, which will make it difficult for them to get a close look at him. Not that he needs an advantage.

The officers stop at a door about four meters from the stairway. The one with the sunglasses punches a number into a cell phone and says, “We’re here. Knocking now.”

The other man knocks briskly, three times in rapid succession.

The cops hear locks being undone on the other side of the door. One of them makes a joke, perhaps about the number of locks, but both men straighten instantly as the door opens. They back off a few steps to allow the man inside to come out.

Inside the stairwell, the janitor peers through the crack between the doors. He sees his man, almost as wide as he is tall, come out of the apartment. The big man nods at the policemen and turns to re-lock the door. Behind him, one of the cops taps his watch: they’re late.

The big man is in his early fifties, loose-lipped and red-faced with the spider-veined complexion of a heavy drinker. He has sloping, powerful shoulders, oddly long arms that let his hands dangle almost at his knees, and a relatively small head. His hair stands up on one side, as though he’s forgotten to smooth it down
after a nap. His white shirt is wet enough beneath the arms to be almost transparent. He pushes between the policemen and trundles stiff-hipped toward the elevator. The cops follow, the one with the sunglasses briefly imitating the wide man’s walk.

Looking back, the wide man says, “Something funny?” His voice is unexpectedly high-pitched.

The cop who had been imitating him says, “Got a rock in my shoe.” The wide man pushes the button to summon the elevator car.

Behind the swinging doors, the man in the janitorial uniform makes a final check of everything in his case, touches the pockets on his work shirt, counts to three, and pushes through into the hallway.

One of the doors creaks, and the big man and one of the cops turn their heads at the sound. They see a thin, stooped, white-haired man silhouetted against the window’s glare, carrying a wooden box clearly too heavy for him. His halting step suggests a limp although it’s unclear which leg he’s favoring.

The elevator door opens. The cop with the sunglasses steps into the compartment and holds the door for the big man. The other cop and the big man get in.

The janitor calls, “Can you wait for me, please?”

The big man says, “Fuck off” in his high, aggrieved voice and pushes the button to close the door.

The janitor drops the case of bottles with a crash and makes a leap for the elevator. He has an automatic pistol in one hand and a bottle of cleaning solution in the other. The policeman wearing sunglasses makes a snatch at his gun, but the automatic in the janitor’s hand jumps twice with a muffled sound like
pfuttt
, and blows a pair of holes in the elevator’s back wall. Both cops raise their hands above waist level, the big man screaming for them to shoot. He flails at the elevator doors with small, plump hands, as though he thinks he can hurry their closing.