The Hot Countries (25 page)

27

Let Me See Your Teeth

“You saw the
way she was, the way she was lying there,” Miaow says as the hotel elevator doors close. Rafferty figures they've got about thirty seconds alone before they get to their floor.

“What about it?”

“How small she was making herself.” Miaow is still working on the black nail polish. “What she wanted was to get smaller and smaller until she was like
 . . .
I don't know, a seed. And then
pop
, just disappear.”

Rafferty is looking at the top of her head as she worries at the nail polish. Compelled by sheer opportunity, he leans over and tousles her hair, which she immediately pats back into place. He says, “Why don't you part it in the middle again?”

Brushing it out of her face, she says, “Same reason you don't shave all yours off and grow a long beard. It looks stupid.”

The bell on the other side of the door chimes softly to announce their arrival. He says, “I think you helped her.”

“I don't know,” Miaow says, heading into the corridor. “Nobody can help anybody who doesn't want help.”

It's almost nine by the time he leaves Miaow and Rose to their evening stiff-upper-lip marathon, using the hotel's DVD player. On the way up Patpong, squinting through the drizzle and failing to spot his watcher, he ducks into the Expat Bar, where he finds only Leon, Campeau, and Toots in residence.

“It is early still,” Hofstedler says a bit huffily, as though Rafferty's “Where is everybody?” had been a criticism. “Our friends here, they have lives, you know.”

Rafferty says, “I'm sure they do,”

Hofstedler nods acceptance of Rafferty's contrition and glances down at his watch. “This is Tuesday,” he announces to the room, as though he suspects they haven't been keeping up. “Miaow's play is Friday, yes?”

“It is. I watched the rehearsal today. It'll be good.”

“I am coming, Pinky is coming, Louis is coming.” It takes Rafferty a moment before he realizes that
Louis
is the Growing Younger man. “The one with the hair is coming,” Leon concludes.

“Ron,” Campeau says. “His name is Ron. Am I invited?”

“Of course you're invited, Bob,” Rafferty says, wondering what will happen when Rose sees him. “Wouldn't be a first night without you.”

Campeau says, “Should I dress up?”

Rafferty says, “I'm going to wear a clean shirt.”

“Wow,” Campeau says. “Semiformal.”

“We've got, what, two, three days?” Rafferty says. “We can talk more about it later. Leon, did you keep your eyes open getting here?”

“There was a man looking at me,” Hofstedler says. “The street was not yet crowded, so even I could see him.”

“
Even
you?”

“Wallace tells me that I do not notice things.”

“Well,” Rafferty says, “compared to Wallace
 . . .
”

“He is not so good tonight, Wallace,” Hofstedler says. “In fact, he is very bad. When I knock on his door? First he does not answer, and then he calls me Ernie, through the door. Several times he calls me Ernie. I invite him to Miaow's play, and he does not reply. I knock several more times, substantially. I say, ‘I come to take you to the bar,' and he says, ‘I have a date.'” Hofstedler has hoisted his beer, but he puts it down in order to spread his hands as though to say,
What can you do?
“It is a bad night, I think.”

“He's seemed
 . . .
” Rafferty searches for an accurate word, and the one he comes up with seems sadly insufficient. “
Better
lately.”

Toots says, “Sometime good, sometime no good.”

“It is like the tide,” Hofstedler says, wiping foam from his lip. “It comes in and then it goes out.”

“Except,” Campeau says, “it goes out a little farther every time.”

Looking up at him, Hofstedler says, “This is all of us, yes, Bob?”

The RiffRaff is
dank with steam from the kitchen and loud with the voices of men who are already well into their evening's quota of beer. Here and there a bar girl twinkles like a rhinestone, sitting beside the man who paid her bar fine. Some of them are working the job: listening, laughing, looking appreciative, keeping the current flowing with occasional touches on the man's arm or the back of his hand. Others sit passively, just waiting for the next stage of the transaction.

One of his favorite waitresses holds up two fingers for
Two minutes
and inclines her head toward Rafferty's usual booth in the window, where three heavyset Western men, one of them black, are examining their money as though it were Kleenex and sliding the check from hand to hand. The African-American guy finally takes charge, squinting at the bills with the king's face on them as he counts them out. When he's got a loose pile on top of the check, he shrugs, and all three of them get up. On the way out, one of them, looking over his shoulder at a woman in the corner, bumps into the waitress. When Rafferty turns, curious about who the man was looking at, he sees that it's Lutanh, who's making adoring moon eyes at her customer. When she feels Poke's gaze, she puts her hand to her forehead and, from behind it, winks at him.

He sits while the table is still wet and orders some noodles with pork, basil, and chili, plus a small Singha. Still vibrating from the story that Miaow told Treasure, he's staring at the table as it dries and wondering whether she's shared it with Rose. The thought is broken when the waitress arrives and plunks down an oversize bottle of beer.

Rafferty starts to protest, and she says, “Big one. On the house because we don't see you too much and we want you come back. Boss think we give you free beer, you come back fast.”

He says, “He figured me out.” His attention is drawn by movement behind her, a Western guy with a shaved head, dressed entirely in black, who is escorting not one but two bar workers, one of whom—the older of the pair, by ten years or so—looks vaguely familiar. The man wears glasses with circular black lenses, the design of which owes a great deal to the old film
The Matrix
. Add it all up, Rafferty thinks, and it's a pathetic portrait of
Homo westernus
in Bangkok: shaving his head because he's balding and wearing black because he thinks it makes him look thinner, all to appeal to women whose only worry about his age would be that he might die on top of them and to whom the thickness of his midsection takes a distant second place in importance to the thickness of his wallet. And the poor clown is topping it off with a pair of shades that were mildly hip, in a derivative way, maybe fifteen, sixteen years ago.

The man in black waves the two women to an empty table and does a peremptory little back-and-forth with his hand, index finger pointing at the women as he looks at the waitress, meaning
Give them
w
hatever they want
. All pretty lordly, not likely to make friends. The man's upper lip looks a yard long.

Rafferty's lost in the tabletop again when the man in black slides into the seat opposite. He takes off the glasses to reveal bright blue eyes and says, as though continuing an interrupted conversation, “There's an informal interrogator's code about getting the information you need.” He holds up a hand, palm out. “Stop me if you're already an expert in all this.”

“No wonder you were wearing that dumb mustache,” Rafferty says, trying to get his heartbeat under control. “I thought it was to make your teeth look white, but it wasn't. It was because you've got enough skin on your upper lip to make a pair of gloves.”

Varney nods acknowledgment that Rafferty has spoken and ignores what he said. “So the first thing you have to do is get the subject's
attention
. Normally you do that by putting him or her in the room. The room is a great attention getter. You know which decorator touch makes for a great interrogation room?”

“You've actually forgotten the real first step—” Rafferty begins.

“A drain in the middle of the floor,” Varney says. He's got his left hand flat on the table and the right is down, out of sight, which gives Rafferty a cold, sloshy feeling in his lower belly. “Raises all sorts of imaginative possibilities, that drain does.
Why do they need
that
? What gets hosed down
that
thing?
” He shakes his head as Rafferty begins to speak again. “I know, you've got a lot to say, but I have an agenda in mind, and I won't be here long. Nice-looking girls, aren't they? One of them anyway. The things bar girls learn to do—but hey, why am I telling
you
that? You're the expert.”

Rafferty keeps his face blank while mentally running through four or five ways to kill him. The anger actually calms him.

“Aaaahhh, I'm sorry,” Varney says, showing his big, square teeth in a grin. “Not worthy of me. Just a little payback for those things you said about the way I look, my teeth and all that. Let me see your teeth.”

Rafferty says, “Fuck you.”

“Let me see your teeth,” Varney says again, in exactly the same tone. “And if you're asking yourself why you should, just look to your left, out through the nice window until you see Kiet. You'll recognize him. He's got that awful-looking long coat on, and he's been glued to your shoes whenever you were in the neighborhood. See him?”

Rafferty says, “I do.” He
has
seen him before. In the glass he can also see Varney's reflection, and he watches Varney make a gesture like someone opening a door. Kiet obediently tugs the long coat aside for just a moment, showing Rafferty a short automatic rifle, probably an MP5 submachine gun. Then the coat swoops closed and the man gives him a big smile.

“He can take out this window and half the people in here, including that waitress you seem to like so much, in about three seconds and be up at Surawong and behind the motorcycle driver who's waiting for him while people out there are still looking for the bomb. And while he's firing, I'll use the gun in my right hand, the one down
here
”—he raps his knuckles on the table—“to blow your kneecap to pieces. Unless I miss and hit you in the balls. Show me your teeth.”

Rafferty bares his teeth, fighting the impulse to lean over and bite off the man's nose.

“Not so great. Not much whiter than mine. Do you drink a lot of coffee?”

“Yes.”

“That'll do it. You could drink it through a straw, you know.”

“You came here to talk to me. Talk.”

“At my own pace. And we're actually here so
you
can talk to
me
, since you have what I want. And that leads us back to the topic at hand. You haul the subject into the room, remember? Circumstances didn't permit me to drag you into a room, so I got your attention with a kind of metaphorical room, that first note, the question it implied:
Where's the money?
I always hope that a subject will be forthcoming and helpful, spare us all a lot of trouble, but it rarely works out that way.”

“Maybe it's something about you,” Rafferty says. “Maybe people just don't like—”

“So I asked you again, a different question, but on the same topic. The money, the girl.”

“Well, if you ever do this again, let me make a suggestion. Give whoever it is a chance to answer.”

“One school of thought says there's no point in letting the subject answer early on. First answers are always lies. Anyhow, you knew perfectly well who sent those first two notes. There were any number of ways you could have signaled me. You could have said something to the people you saw watching you. Instead you got all clever, didn't you? When the subject gets dodgy, it means only one thing: the truth is not on tap.”

“I don't have—”

Varney lets his hand drop, open and flat, onto the table. The bang it makes draws eyes from all over the room. “So the next step is to establish the subject's pain threshold. With some people, only thing you need is the drain on the floor. The world is full of people who would sell their mother to avoid learning what that drain is for. But most people—if the answer concerns something or someone they care about—need to scream a little first. Makes them feel better about themselves later.”

“I
don't have the money
.”

“What money?” Varney's face is bland. “What money are we talking about?”

“The three million—”

“
That
money,” Varney says. “Of course you do. So, as I was saying, we try to locate the pain threshold and then push just a
little
past it. In your case, since I couldn't grab you someplace where you weren't surrounded by people, physical pain wasn't in the cards, so I put you instead into an ethical dilemma that I thought would cause you
emotional
pain. But it seems I was mistaken.” He picks up the dark glasses in his free hand and holds them in front of his face, sighting Rafferty through the lenses. “See, I had you sized up as a good-hearted progressive, the way you put all those solid one-world principles into practice: marrying the bar girl, adopting the street kid, turning your whole life into a step up for the downtrodden.
Rescuing
the downtrodden, one beautiful woman at a time. I figured you for one of those moist souls who think we're all responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world. You know—a truckload of ignorant but devout dickwads shoot a schoolgirl in the face, and the progressives seize the blame and share it with the rest of us: ‘Oh, it's the result of nineteenth-century European imperialism and our greed for oil. Shame on us, shame on us.'”