For the Dead (7 page)

The janitor reaches the elevator as the doors start to slide shut. He pitches the bottle of cleaning solution, overhand, between the
doors. It smashes against the wall, and the hallway fills with the scent of gasoline. One of the policemen tries to force his way out, but the janitor shoots him low in the stomach, and the cop is thrown back against the wall. He slides down into the pool of gasoline on the floor, his hands grasping his abdomen, his eyes wide, his mouth opening and closing. The sunglasses fall off his nose and land in his lap, which is a bright, shiny red. The big man is screaming and kicking at the fallen policeman. The other cop backs to the far side of the elevator as though he’s hoping he can push his way through the wall. Just before the elevator doors meet, the janitor yanks a handful of wooden matches from the pocket of his work shirt, strikes them on the zipper on his pants, and pitches them into the elevator, shouting four words as he backs away.

But not fast enough. The plume of flame billowing through the narrow gap between the closing doors is so hot it burns off his eyebrows and eyelashes.

The screams grow fainter as the car descends. The janitor steps back, waving cool air at his face and smelling his own singed hair as he watches the digital numbers above the elevator doors, the remnants of his eyebrows raised in surprise. The elevator compartment obediently carries its burning passengers down five slow floors before the sprinklers kick in and trigger the automatic emergency override.

The janitor goes back up the hall, picks up his case of cleaning solutions, and pushes his way through the door to the stairs. He doesn’t hurry on his way down.

T
HE MAN IN
the orange turban is a Sikh. He has the blackest beard and mustache Miaow has ever seen, apparently darkened with eyebrow pencil. His shop is just an overhang of cloth dangling from poles over a scrap of carpet and two scratched and battered glass display cases that look like they fell off a truck. Masking tape runs all the way from corner to corner on the front panel of the right-hand case. Behind the glass is a miscellaneous scatter of cell phones.

When Miaow spotted the shop, there had been two sunburned
farang
tourists, a boy and a girl, wearing the thrift-shop clothes of backpackers. The Sikh had motioned to Miaow to wait, although his eyes kept floating back to her and Andrew as though he expected them to kick in the glass, snatch the phones, and run. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, the tourists leave without buying anything, although Miaow sees the girl slip a phone under her blouse. When she looks up, she finds the Sikh eying her, penciled eyebrows raised. He says, “Watch, small lady.”

He lifts his head to look beyond her and points a single finger in the direction the tourists had taken, and two teenage boys take off at a run.

“You think easy, you children?” He raises a finger and wags it side to side. “Not so easy. Maybe two days, that boy walk very bad. Lady have maybe headache.” He smiles, and his face is
transformed into a wreath of benevolence. “But you children, you good children. Nice clothes. Good shoes.” He looks down at Andrew’s feet. “Adidas, real, maybe five thousand baht.”

“Seven thousand, two hundred,” Andrew says.

“Too much,” the Indian says in a tone that brooks no argument. “Five thousand, or if you are me, maybe four thousand seven hundred.”

Andrew says, “Never.”

The Indian says, “You are wanting something? If we bargain we will see who wins.”

Andrew says, “Apple iPhone 5.”

The Sikh wiggles his head left to right. “Too rich for you. Get nice cheap phone, you don’t need—”

“Don’t you have one?”

The Sikh pauses, possibly evaluating Andrew’s tone, which had bordered in imperious. Then he gives them a shrug. “Of course. Wait here.” He goes to the rear of the shop and opens a large cardboard box that’s resting on top of another box. Crouching beside it, he says, “I am looking here, but others are looking at you.”

Miaow says, “We’re not thieves.”

“No, no, not,” the Sikh says, sorting quickly through the box. “But sometimes we learn things about ourselves, yes? Many phones, man not looking, you very young, you can run fast. Maybe we learn something about you, yes?”

“And maybe you don’t have what we want,” Miaow snaps. Irritation is a good starting point for bargaining.

“I have, I have.” He stands and comes back to the counter with a phone in each hand, and a boy of seventeen or so materializes from thin air and casually puts onto the counter the phone the backpacking girl had taken. “Femily,” the man says confidentially, with a gesture toward the retreating boy. “Everything is femily.”

He puts the two iPhones on the counter. They look identical to Miaow, but Andrew shoves one aside and says, “Too beat up.” He picks up the other one and powers it on. Raises his eyebrows in an
expression of approval that makes Miaow want to step on his toe. “Very nice. SIM card?”

The Sikh shrugs, but Miaow can practically see him adding a thousand baht to the price. “If you want.”

“Whoever sold this didn’t take his SIM card?”

There’s a tiny glimmer of humor in the Sikh’s eyes. “Maybe he forget.”

“It’s got all his stuff on it,” Andrew says, finger-dancing on the screen. “His phone numbers, his apps, his pictures. Why would he forget it?”

“Pipple,” the Sikh says with a shrug. “Everybody different.”

“Maybe he stole it,” Andrew says severely.

“Maybe,” the Sikh says. The dazzling smile again. “Maybe all of these stolen.” He looks at the two of them and makes a decision. “You want cold water?”

“Thank you,” Miaow says. The man goes to the rear of the shop area again and comes back with a thermos and a stack of paper cups. “Nobody use before,” he says, separating the cups into uneven stacks and taking two from the middle. “Very clean.”

Andrew puts down the phone and tries to look at it indifferently. He says, “I can pay you—”

Miaow shoulders him aside. “Five thousand baht.”

The Indian laughs, although it doesn’t disturb the precision of his pour. “You making joke,” he says. “My femily. My femily, they eat and eat.”

Miaow picks up a cup and drains the cool water. Then she says, “Show him, Andrew.”

Andrew moves the phone aside and then, as though to make it clear he’s not being sneaky, hands it to the Sikh. He pulls his wallet from his backpack, peels the red rubber band off it, and opens it. The Sikh cranes for a look, and Miaow steps on Andrew’s foot and tries to put a hand over the wallet, but he ignores her and fans the entire wad of currency. “Sixty-three hundred,” he says proudly. He glances at Miaow, and a crafty look comes over his
face. She wants to kick him. “But we need to eat,” he says. “We need a taxi.”

“We have more than one pocket,” the Sikh says.

Between her teeth, Miaow makes a noise like frying bacon.

“That’s it,” Andrew says. He turns his trouser pockets inside out. “I haven’t got any—”

“Ahh, well,” the Sikh says. “I put back.”

“I have three thousand,” Miaow says.

“And you keep,” the Sikh says. He breathes on the phone and polishes it. “This phone, fourteen thousand eight hundred.”

“I have three thousand,” Miaow says.

She gets an expressive Sikh shrug. “Come on,” she says to Andrew. “We’ll get the other one.”

Andrew starts to say something but Miaow gives him a look that backs him up a full step.

“Other one where?” the Sikh man asks.

“Not a member of your femily,” Miaow says. She grabs the sleeve of Andrew’s T-shirt and jerks.

The Sikh tilts the phone so it catches the light. “Fourteen thousand.”

“Twelve thousand, five hundred and that’s it,” Miaow says. It’ll mean she has to spend most of her secret seven-thousand, five hundred-baht stash, the money she always carries, tightly folded, in her rear pocket in case she finds herself abandoned on the street again. She gives one more tug, and this time Andrew comes with her, so suddenly she feels like she should hear a cork pop. Over her shoulder she says to the Sikh, “Up to you.”

The Sikh says, closing the deal, “Twelve-five.”

Andrew, confused, says, “How did we get to twelve-five?”

T
HE TAXI IS
dirty and full of exhaust. Miaow is getting carsick. She and Andrew had to bargain their way down a line of cabs to find one that would take them to school for the amount of money Miaow is willing to pay, so they’re enduring what she thinks must
be the filthiest, stinkiest taxi in Bangkok, with an actual hole in the floor and exhaust fumes floating through it, like incense with a grudge.

“This is kind of creepy,” Andrew says for the third time. He’s apparently indifferent to both the taxi and Miaow’s reaction to it, his eyes on the screen and his finger doing close-up magic with the icons.

“I can’t look.” She fans herself with her hand. “If I look, I’ll throw up.” She looks out at the street and then cracks the window, exposing herself to a stream of hot carbon monoxide with trace amounts of air. She raises the window in self-defense and asks, “Can you turn up the air-con?”

“More air-con, more gas,” the driver says. “You’re not paying enough.”

“How much is it going to cost you to clean this seat if I throw up?”

“Wow,” Andrew says, eyes on the phone. “He has
no idea
.”

The driver turns up the air, grumbling, and she points the vent directly at her face and looks out the window again. She unfocuses her eyes and begins to count silently and slowly. At twenty, she feels good enough to say to Andrew, “Get it ready and show it to me fast.”

“Okay, okay,” Andrew says in the aggrieved tone of someone who’s been interrupted, and Miaow thinks,
This is how he talks to his mother
.

“Here we go,” he says, holding up the phone.

“Down, down, I don’t want to see things moving behind it.”

“This is the guy,” Andrew says. The phone is on his left thigh, the thigh closer to Miaow. She leans forward, turns the vent toward her face’s new location, and looks down.

It’s a man in his hard-used forties, thick-waisted and frog-faced, with rough, damaged skin and a bunched, unpleasant mouth, the mouth of someone who doesn’t hear “no” much. On a sidewalk somewhere in Bangkok. Three-quarter face, not looking at the camera. Wide shoulders and a small paunch. Black oily hair,
combed straight back from a low hairline, a triangular face that narrows toward the top, with the base formed by a broad frog’s jaw that’s slowly sinking into fat. The kind of guy, Miaow thinks, she’d cross the street to avoid.

“Here’s another one,” Andrew says, swiping the screen. “And another. Tell me what you think.”

There are seven pictures of the man. They’re taken from different angles, the man never looking toward the camera. Miaow knows what Andrew means by
creepy
: the man had no idea he was being photographed.

“This is kind of icky,” Andrew says.

“It’s sneaky.” She has a furtive feeling, not entirely unpleasant, as though she’s spying: it feels grimy but a little bit thrilling, too. And then there’s the man himself. He’s what some of her school’s popular girls would describe as nothing to skip lunch for. He looks as if he might be bad to bump into, as though he’s made of something heavier than whatever goes into most people.
Brutal
is the word that comes to mind.

“Look at these,” Andrew says, pointing the tip of his little finger at the man’s head. Gleaming in his left ear are three heavy looped earrings.

“He’s too old to wear those,” Miaow says. “He’s older than
Poke
.”

Andrew says, “I’ve seen him before, I think. Somewhere.”

“
I
haven’t seen him,” Miaow says. “And I don’t want to. He’s scary.”

Andrew nods just as Miaow looks up, on the verge of getting sick, and sees that the driver is pulling to the curb. She puts a hand on the door handle.

“Wait,” Andrew says. His hand lands on her arm. “You’ve got to look again. You haven’t seen the fat one yet.”

A
RTHIT HAS BEEN
trying for half an hour to smile through the abdominal cramps that announce that he’s once again followed his head without consulting his heart. The cramps already feel like snarls of the purest anxiety, but when he opens the door to the small closet, they take a leap in intensity that almost folds him in half.

He
hasn’t cleaned it out
. He remembers now, cataclysmically, that he postponed it out of cowardice. He’d managed to get rid of her shoes and her fancy things—not that her family had let her take many of them when she left to marry him—but he’d told himself not to rush things when it came to her everyday clothes, the clothes he could have recognized a block away on a crowded sidewalk. The clothes that would have made him smile on sight.

So they’re still hanging here.

And they
smell
of her.

She might as well be standing in the closet, looking at him. Noi. His dead wife, the woman who had been the center of his being for almost fifteen years.

“This is the last one,” Anna Chaibancha says, tugging a black, many-zippered suitcase through the door. Her face is shiny with sweat; Arthit has a lower-back spasm to go with his cramps, and Anna insisted on toting her things into the house. All morning Arthit has been holding a silent negotiation with Noi’s ghost as he
distributes Anna’s things here and there, trying to find places where they’ll look natural, where they won’t spring at him every time he comes into a room.
Is it all right if I move this?
he asks the air as he places on the living-room table a photo of the son whom Anna’s rich former husband rarely permits her to see. With a quick apology he slips into the table’s single drawer the picture of him and Noi, beaming into the sunlight beside the climbing rose she’d planted. “You never liked this vase,” he whispers as he replaces it with a plastic trophy from Anna’s son’s school, almost the only token she seems to have of his present life.

Finding places for the cooking implements Anna loves, pushing aside Noi’s old spatula, Noi’s old rolling pin, Noi’s favorite carving knife, Japanese and rusting now because Noi didn’t believe stainless steel took an edge. Anna had looked at it and wrinkled her nose, but Arthit said, “It gets sharper than you can believe.” Her glance had been as sharp as the knife.