A Nail Through the Heart

13

Mr. Ulrich used us both times," the lady behind the desk at Bangkok Domestics says in crisp English.

She is in her forties, clinging grimly to twenty-eight. Her face is white with powder, and her hair has been dyed blacker than a crow's wing and lacquered into a rigid little wave in front that would probably shatter if touched. Her uniform is a frilly lavender junior-miss business suit that sports buttons the size of the door-knobs. It looks like something a small girl would wear on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

The wall behind her is a panorama of past glory. The anxious woman sitting at the desk is pictured in happier times with some of Bangkok's most media-hungry socialites, faded snap after faded snap attesting to a once-thriving concern, supplying domestic help to the wives of the rich and-given the topsy-turvy world of Thai politics-the occasionally powerful.

But now she sits behind a scratched wooden desk in a room barely big enough to exhale into. On the desk, facing Rafferty, is a file, topped by an official-looking form adorned with many impressive seals. One of them, Rafferty notices, is a United States Boy Scouts seal. In the blank for NAME, he reads: Miss Tippawan Dangphai.

"Doughnut," Rafferty says. "Any idea why Doughnut?"

The woman barely shrugs. "Who knows? We have one girl nicknamed Pogo and two who call themselves Banana. Several years back we had one named Aspirin. Girls," she says, as though this explains everything, which it probably does.

A passport-size black-and-white photo has been stapled to the form, next to a blank space where a fingerprint should be. Despite the frivolous nickname, Doughnut is not a particularly blithe-looking girl. She faces the camera glumly, with the attitude of one who knows the picture will not come out. The camera has been kind to the large, beautiful eyes, but it has muddied the dark skin of Isaan, in the northeast. Aside from the eyes, she is not a striking woman. Her face is as wide as it is long, her lower lip too full, and her nose has virtually no bridge to it. It is a face Rafferty sees everywhere in Bangkok, the face of refugees from Isaan's broken villages and barren farms and no rain. On the basis of the photo, Doughnut would be difficult to pick out of a lineup.

"So the first maid stayed with him for ten years?"

"Or more." She makes a patient show of checking a piece of paper in front of her. "Ten years and seven months."

"And then he called you for a replacement."

"Nine weeks ago." She pauses. "As I said."

He feels a flare of irritation. "So you did. And, as I said a minute ago, the man's disappeared, and so has the maid. The maid you selected for him." He sits back, watching her, and then puts out an index finger to move the Bangkok Domestics business card he took from Claus Ulrich's desk. "The maid whose fingerprint you forgot to get."

She straightens, and laces her fingers together on the desk. "Surely there's no question that the maid had anything to do with it."

"Isn't there? Do you know where she is? Has she called to say she's available for work again?"

The air-conditioning unit kicks out for a moment and then kicks in with a depressed hum, something it does every forty seconds or so. However thriving it may once have been, the present Bangkok Domestics is a one-room operation, housed in a deteriorating four-story walk-up in the Pratunam area of the city. If the firm is profitable these days, it is saving a fortune on office space.

"Has she?" Rafferty asks again, since the woman has apparently slipped into a meditative trance, staring down at her file.

"No," she says, without looking up. A furrow appears between her eyebrows, and a fine snow of face powder sifts down toward her lap.

"Right," Rafferty says. "Tell me what the police will say. A missing farang, a missing Thai maid, who cleaned out her room before she left. A farang woman who's come to Bangkok to try to find him. Tell me what the police will say."

"The police are not involved," she says, tidying the piles of paper on her desk.

"Not officially," Rafferty says. He holds up his cell phone. "But perhaps they could be helpful." The woman blinks twice. He begins to dial.

She tells him what he wants to know.

What Claus Ulrich requested-what he had requested both times from Bangkok Domestics-was a relatively young woman, in her early twenties, who could cook and clean and who had at least one strong reference.

"And she had a reference?" Rafferty asks.

A hesitation. The woman's eyes drop to the file again but don't focus on it. "Yes."

"I want to talk to the reference."

"Oh, no," the woman says immediately. "Out of the question."

"Not really," Rafferty says. "Not when you think about it."

She pushes her chair back from the desk very quickly, as though there might be a snake beneath it. "Please, no. This woman is a very good customer. Also-how can I put this? — she is not someone I would want to make angry. She is formidable." The French pronunciation.

"She'll get over it."

The chair is already pressed against the wall so she can go no farther, but she flutters her hands at him, making him feel like a bird she is trying to shoo out a window. "Please, let me explain. There are people you meet who, you know at once, will make a good friend. I'm sure this has happened to you. And then, much more rarely, there are people who you know immediately will make a bad enemy." The fluttering turns into a fanning gesture, as though her face is hot. "A very bad enemy."

"This is a woman you met on the phone," Rafferty says, "not on a battlefield."

"I was called to her house," the woman says, as though this will make it all clear. "I spent time with her. She is…" She searches the air above Rafferty's head, looking for the words. "She is not easily forgettable."

"Well, I'm sorry, because I'm going to have to talk to her. In fact, I need a photocopy of the reference she wrote."

"This is very bad." She is fanning herself again.

Rafferty smiles at her reassuringly. "Oh, come on. What can she do to you?"

"I don't want to know," the woman says.

Three minutes and one more mention of the police later, he has a copy of the letter of reference and a pair of fuchsia-colored sticky notes with Doughnut's address and the number for the sole telephone in the village she left behind. Halfway to the door, he turns back.

"It might be a good idea to talk to Ulrich's first maid, too."

A pause, during which the woman seems to be framing her reply. "She's dead," she says at last. "Motorbike accident. That's why he needed a new one."

Rafferty takes another look at the cramped little office. "Where do your girls come from?"

She blinks surprise at the question. "The northeast, mostly."

"Do you have any former go-go girls working for you?"

The heavily powdered upper lip rises a scornful quarter of an inch. Compared to the dead white of the powder, her teeth are yellow. "Of course not."

"Why not?"

"They're liars and thieves, every one of them. Liars and thieves."

"Really," Rafferty says, thinking of Rose's roomful of scrubbed hopefuls and then the scrubbed room Doughnut had left behind. "We couldn't have that, could we?"