A Nail Through the Heart

18

When Rafferty comes out of his bedroom, much earlier than usual, the boy is asleep on the couch. He has taken off Miaow's blouse and folded it so neatly it looks as if it just came from the laundry. He lies flat on his back with one knee upraised. The sheet he covered himself with is crumpled on the floor. Above the blue sweatpants, his hipbones protrude like parentheses, below a chest as narrow as a bird's. The ribs are clearly visible, the hollows between them as insubstantial as finger smudges on a wall. His belly practically touches his backbone. In the soft curves beneath his eyes, circles of weariness shade into the transparent gray of an old, old bruise. He has thrown one arm out, stretched above his head, and Rafferty is transfixed by the pale vulnerability of the boy's underarm.

He moans, and Rafferty tiptoes into the kitchen. The last thing they need right now is for Superman to wake up and find Rafferty looming over him.

He makes a cup of Nescafe. He loathes Nescafe, but it is quieter than grinding beans. Nescafe marks one of the visible points of difference between his world and Rose's. Twenty or so years ago, in one of the first invasions by a Western brand name, Nescafe shouldered aside the much more labor-intensive processes by which the Thais made some of the world's best coffee, replacing taste with convenience. One of the reasons Rafferty hates it is that it is a clear line of demarcation between the relatively leisurely pace of life in traditional Thailand and the hurry-up influence of the West. But Rose grew up with Nescafe. She adores it, hot, tepid, or iced. He has seen her eat a teaspoon of it, dry. No matter how many pounds of expensive beans Rafferty buys, she always makes sure there is a jar of Nescafe in his kitchen.

He takes a sip, rolls it around in his mouth like red wine, and revises his opinion. It's an interesting drink if you don't insist that it's coffee. An unpretentious little variant, he writes in his head, with no affectations of breeding. With his second cup, he silently toasts Rose, out cold in the other room. His mouth still feels warm where he kissed her as she slept.

The previous evening, after Rose dropped off to sleep, he had enjoyed a pleasant quarter of an hour studying her face, the upper lip with its upward curve in the center, the smooth swell of cheekbones, the slight flaring of her nostrils as she breathed. Then he had forced himself from the bed and spent a much less pleasant thirty minutes packing the small duffel bag he lifts now, with a grunt of effort. It contains his tools for the day: a slim jim for breaking in to cars, a crowbar, a heavy hammer, and a pair of bolt cutters. He doesn't know what he'll need the bolt cutters for, but it seems like the right kind of thing to take along. He closes the door softly and then remembers to double-lock it.

Thirty minutes later the bejeweled density of Ulrich's apartment overwhelms him once again. With the drapes drawn to shut out the heat, it has a tacky kind of Aladdin's-cave glamour, all shining surfaces and hidden treasures. He turns on the air con, listening to it kick reluctantly into gear. The air that flows from the vents smells like rust.

Lights on in every room, Rafferty decides to start with the furniture.

On his hands and knees, he checks the underside of each table in the living room. Nothing taped to them. Nothing in the curved drawers of the antique dresser except household clutter: keys, batteries, cleaning cloths, candles, paper napkins, old warranties and brochures-the kind of stuff nobody knows where to put. He pockets the keys, and then he pulls the drawers all the way out and looks beneath them. Nothing.

The cushions slide off the sofa easily, releasing a whiff of damp foam rubber. He puts them on the floor and presses down with his hands. Nothing hidden inside, or at least nothing bulky. He unzips the covers and peers between the fabric and the foam. No papers, no deeds, no travel documents. No million baht in hoarded cash.

After a strenuous hour, Rafferty has to admit that the living room is a wash, but at least the apartment is cooling down.

If the kitchen holds any secrets, they are culinary. Uncle Claus has amassed an impressive library of cookbooks, most of them well used if the punctuation marks of food are any indication. The size of his shirts becomes less of a puzzle. The cupboards set a whole new standard for predictability: The herb jars contain herbs, the tea bags contain tea, and the sugar jar contains sugar, which is being mined by a railroad train of ants. The freezer is empty except for some shrunken ice cubes. There are no diamonds hidden in a glass of water. There is no uranium hidden in a wine bottle, although some bottles of very good wine rest on their sides beneath the counter.

Two rooms down, nothing revealed.

On entering the bedroom, one burning question takes possession of him: How could anyone sleep here? The sheer volume of dust all the room's junk would gather oppresses him. If he were to sleep in this bed with its scarlet canopies, he thinks, he would have dreams that would give night sweats to a concentration-camp guard.

How had Claus Ulrich lived here? He was a big man. Didn't he feel cramped? There must have been times when he just felt like stepping out onto the balcony and screaming, "Give me space!"

Rafferty starts by stripping the bed. He lets the covers fall where they will; he's given up on the idea of preserving order. When he gets to the sheets, he learns that Uncle Claus is losing his hair. On and around the pillow are enough fine brown hairs to choke a small cat.

There is nothing else on the bed, nothing under the mattress. Nothing beneath the bed, except for a single soiled sock, nothing taped to the underside of the box spring. The bureau drawers contain what men's bureau drawers everywhere contain: socks-including the laundered match to the dirty one under the bed-underwear, T-shirts, playing cards, male junk.

Except for a small collection of excellent, if flashy, watches: a gold Rolex, a Cartier tank watch, also gold, a platinum Ebel. Add them to the Vacheron Constantin on the table, they probably cost fifty thousand dollars or so. Would Uncle Claus have left these-so expensive, so portable-behind?

And did the maid leave before Uncle Claus did? Did they leave together? Is that why the sheets haven't been changed? Is that why the sock is still under the bed? Is that why the watches haven't been stolen? The maid, he thinks again. The maid.

He gives up on the bedroom as too depressing to survive for another minute and goes into the maid's room. It's been wiped as clean as a murder scene. Every drawer is empty. Every surface gleams. The light switches have been scrubbed. The scouring powder on the floor scrapes underfoot. So she cleaned her room but not Uncle Claus's. And she cleaned it very thoroughly.

The maid's small, perfunctory bathroom is more interesting. It, too, has been scoured like a hospital operating room, but the chipped and aging grout between the floor tiles nearest to the tub is stained unevenly, an unnerving rust brown. The concentration is heaviest near the tub, but there are also outlying islands of brown that probably represent splash patterns. Clarissa's apprehensive face comes into his mind, and he finds himself dreading what the stains might mean to her. He spends a few sober moments on his hands and knees, looking for anything he might have missed, and finds nothing but a rusted bobby pin wedged in the drain of the sink. He'll tell Arthit about the stains and get him to have them analyzed.

That leaves the room he actually came to search. He goes into the living room, retrieves the heavy bag, and lugs it into the office.

He sees it the moment he comes through the door, as obvious as a missing wall: All of Uncle Claus's software is gone.

The plastic storage tower that held the CD-ROMs is empty. The CD-ROM drive on the computer lolls open like a tongue. It, too, is empty.

"You dumb shit," Rafferty says aloud. He hadn't even thought about loading any of the disks into the computer, checking to see what they really were. He'd looked at the bootleg packages labeled WINDOWS, MICROSOFT WORD, EXCEL, PHOTOSHOP, and taken them at face value. There had been twenty to twenty-five disks. There may have been DVDs. Enough to hold gigabytes of information.

Uncle Claus's footprints.

For a long minute, Rafferty just stands there excoriating himself. He comes up with several inventive ways to say "stupid" and actually thinks about writing one of them down for future use in a book. Instead he tries each of the keys from the living room on the filing cabinet and then gives up and opens the bag he has toted with him.

Two strokes of the hammer drive the edge of the crowbar into the space around the upper drawer, and three good, back-wrenching pulls buckle the drawer in a rewarding fashion. It juts forward like a broken jaw. It is still locked, but he has opened it far enough to work it back and forth until the tongue of the latch comes free from the frame and the top drawer slides open.

As long as he is at it, he pulls it all the way out, giving him access to the middle drawer without having to destroy it. He sits on the floor with the top drawer in front of him and begins to go through it.

More bills and receipts, going further back than the ones in the desk drawer. He puts them in the duffel bag for review later. A photocopy of an international driver's license with Uncle Claus peering uncomfortably from the upper right. More unused letterhead for AT Enterprises. Two big manila envelopes. One of them contains Claus Ulrich's passport.

The other contains Claus Ulrich's passport.

Rafferty sits back on his heels. Both are current. One of them is for Claus Pieter Ulrich, a citizen of Australia. The other is for Claus David Ulrich, a citizen of Great Britain. Uncle Claus is two people.

At the rear of the drawer is a sheaf of American Express Travelers Cheques, already signed and countersigned. Anyone could cash them. They are in hundred-dollar denominations, banded together in groups of twenty-five. There are eight bundles in all, two hundred individual checks. Twenty thousand dollars, as negotiable as greenbacks.

The heart medicine, the wristwatches, the money. The stains on the bathroom floor.

Wherever Uncle Claus has gone, he didn't choose to go there. In all likelihood, he didn't go anywhere.

Rafferty feels pity rise up in him. Ulrich was a man alone, a man like Rafferty before he met Miaow and Rose, a man trying to make whatever he could of the life he had been given. He was a man who had loved his niece.

The second drawer of the cabinet beckons, but that involves getting up, and for the moment Rafferty doesn't feel equal to the exertion. Take three or four deep, slow breaths, put down the hands, push yourself upright, he thinks as he does it. On his feet, he rests a hand on top of the cabinet to steady himself and peers down into the second drawer.

What he sees makes his day even darker.

The drawer is completely full, jammed to overflowing with videotapes in lurid packages. Reluctantly he reaches down, fishes one out. CINEMAGIC, it says on the spine. On the cover is a young Japanese woman, bound hand and foot with leather restraints. A ball gag has been forced into her mouth, secured by a strap that has been fastened tightly around her head. There are tear tracks down her face.

"Oh, hell," Rafferty says despairingly. Clarissa Ulrich's face swims up at him again. The apartment suddenly feels cold.

He pulls out four more: appalling variations on the theme of female torment and humiliation, all Japanese. The tapes look professionally packaged, meticulously lighted, produced with Japanese attention to detail: pain for sale.

The drawer is packed to the top rim. There must be fifty of the things.

He grabs a couple of cassettes at random and goes back into the one room he gave up on, the bedroom.

He finds the television in a teak armoire. The cassette player is below it. He turns it on, inserts the tape, and presses "play."

The tape has not been rewound. He hears the whistle and crack of a whip, followed by a muffled scream, before the picture tube brightens.

The young woman has been twisted forward and tied across the frame of a high-backed chair. She is naked. The man behind her lifts a knotted cat-o'-nine-tails and brings it down over her bare back with all his strength. The sound goes through Rafferty like a gunshot. There is no question about the damage being done. Her back begins to bleed.

Rafferty turns it off.

He wants to vomit.

The next tape is worse.

By the time he is back in the office, trying to pop the third drawer of the cabinet, he has managed to put it into some sort of skewed perspective. The man has an obsession with pornography of a particularly vile kind. After all, Rafferty tells himself, these aren't snuff films, just an appalling subgenre of professionally produced porn: Yes, it really hurts, but the participants are consenting adults. Japan being Japan, some of the actresses probably have fan clubs. Ulrich is undoubtedly long overdue for some serious psychiatry, but it doesn't necessarily mean that his fantasies carry over into his actions. One thing Rafferty has learned in Bangkok is that it's impossible to guess at anyone's sexual proclivities. Claus Ulrich, for all his disgusting peccadilloes, for all the violence he is doing to his own spirit, is probably harmless to others.

Then he works the third drawer open and sees the leather straps. The chains. The whips. The gags. The devices designed for insertion into a human body. His hand comes back involuntarily; he can't bring himself to touch them. He sits there, looking at this tangle of pathology and seeing disappointed eyes and a mass of flyaway hair, and he wishes he'd never heard of Clarissa Ulrich.

"Good Lord," says the woman at the door. "What a decorative mix you are. Thai and what?"

"Irish," Rafferty says. "Filipino on my mother's side."

"How nice. Like a new cocktail or something. You know, you're always thinking Cointreau and what? But then you taste it, and it works." The woman is an American, in her early thirties, halfway through Hofstedler's Tragic Decade of Decline, and wearing it well. Her light hair is twisted into a loose knot, held in place by three or four random pins. She came to the door in a robe with a cup of coffee in her hand, reminding Rafferty how early it is. She has a comfortable, slept-in look.

Rafferty is too drained to force a reply. "Have you seen anyone go in and out of the apartment next door in the past few days?"

"My, my," she says. "A mystery."

"It's important. I wouldn't bother you otherwise."

"'Bother' is kind of a strong word." She leans forward slightly, and Rafferty catches a whiff of fresh bread. "Only the maid," she says. "Porkpie or whatever her name is."

"Doughnut."

"She came out of the apartment yesterday, about four. I practically bumped into her, right where you're standing. She was carrying a shopping bag full of stuff."

"This one," Rafferty says, showing her Doughnut's photograph. He forces a smile. The corners of his mouth feel like they weigh ten pounds each.

"That's her. First time anybody's been next door in weeks."

He leans forward to rest his weight against the wall. It brings him closer to her, but she does not step back. "When Mr. Ulrich was here, were you aware of anything strange going on?"

"Claus? Strange?" She blows on the surface of her coffee, and he can feel the breeze of her breath. "Claus Ulrich is the most boring man alive." She looks down at the coffee and back up at him. The gaze has a sleepy force behind it.

"People coming and going?"

"Only the maid. Popcorn." Her eyes crinkle just enough to register amusement, not enough to emphasize wrinkles. "Why do they call themselves things like that?"

"Because they can."

"I had a maid once, called herself Pun. This was a girl who wouldn't recognize a joke if it wore a T-shirt with JOKE written on it." She moves toward him very slightly and slips a finger through the hooked handle of the coffee cup. "So. As someone who's almost, sort of, halfway, second cousin to the Thais, what's your theory?"

This woman is not going to be rushed. "Thais have very long names. If they didn't choose short ones, they'd never get to the verb in a sentence. 'Pun' is short for 'Apple.' Girls like the word, and they choose the last syllable, but they can't produce the terminal l, so it comes out 'pun' instead of 'pl.' Okay?"

"Okay. A little silly, but okay. Your turn for a question."

"Were you ever in Claus's apartment?"

She looks past him for a moment, deciding whether to answer. "Once. I needed to borrow something."

"What?"

"Oh, who knows? A cup of sugar, isn't that what it always is?"

"Just curious?"

A sleepy shrug. "This is Bangkok. Boring or not, he could have been anybody over there, just on the other side of the wall. A random silly-nickname generator. Someone who performed human sacrifices."

"But he wasn't."

"Not with that furniture. If he was sacrificing anything, it was taste." She hoists the coffee cup and extends it in his direction. She gives him a lopsided grin. "You want some? I just made a pot." She blows coffee steam toward him. "It's hot."

"No, thanks," Rafferty says virtuously. "I have to get home to my kids."

Her eyes slide over his face. "It's hot every morning," she says.

Rafferty doesn't even make it to the elevator. Instead he drops his bag to the floor and leans heavily against the wall of the corridor.

A wealthy foreigner, committed to a particularly furtive form of sexual expression, settles in Bangkok. So there, at any rate, is the reason for the lack of footprints Rafferty's been wondering about. For good reason the man keeps to himself, except for his erotic partners, who are undoubtedly professionals. He wouldn't find many volunteers. The Thais, overwhelmingly, take a simpler view of sex. They see it as fun.

Then the man disappears. Normally, you'd look for one of the partners. Maybe things went too far; maybe he violated the limits they set before they started the session. Rafferty doesn't know much about S amp;M, but he's certain that some sort of pact exists between the participants, some line that won't be crossed, some magic word to bring things to a halt. There has to be something to protect the one who is being done to.

Perhaps Claus Ulrich crossed the line, turned a deaf ear to the word. The session stopped being sex, however ritualized and however twisted, and became real violence. The partner became a victim. Maybe there was an injury, maybe worse. A grudge was held. The partner, or her pimp, or her friend, came back to settle things. Uncle Claus either fled-in a great hurry, obviously-or was taken. Or was killed there, leaving stains in the grouting of the maid's bathroom.

So what about the maid?

A young girl with modest skills, just down from the thin-dirt farms of Isaan. She gets one job in Bangkok, lasts for a few weeks-long enough to wheedle a reference-and quits. She immediately turns up at Claus Ulrich's, and he hires her because his maid of ten years or so has just been killed in a motorbike accident. Eight weeks later Claus Ulrich is missing.

A thought straightens Rafferty's spine. A really convenient time for the first maid to die, wasn't it?

He goes back and knocks again.

"You came back." She has brushed her hair so it falls to her shoulders. Rafferty liked it better the other way. She has put the coffee down somewhere, and her arms are crossed loosely across her chest.

"I was thinking about the maid," he says.

Something like disappointment flickers in her face, but she masters it and gives him a perfunctory smile. "What about her?"

"The first one, actually. I was thinking it must have upset Claus when she was killed. She'd worked for him for so long." He knows the answer from her face, even before he stops speaking.

"Noot? Killed? Don't be silly, she quit. Drove Claus up the wall, too. He offered her the world to stay, but she'd had enough. I mean, you've seen the place. Can you imagine cleaning all that every day?"

"Do you have any idea where she is?"

"This very moment, you mean?"

The question surprises him. "If you know."

"Sure. She's down in Mr. Choy's apartment-he's a Chinese gentleman? He's in latex. I mean as a business, not a wardrobe. It's 4-B. She's been working there since the day she left Claus."

The door to 4-B opens a few inches. The woman peering through the crack is small, wiry, and dark-skinned, probably in her early fifties. "Mr. Choy not here," she says.

"But you're Noot," Rafferty says.

She nods, her eyes fixed on him. He is willing to bet she has her foot against the door.

"I was just wondering why you quit your job working for Mr. Ulrich, upstairs."

Noot ponders the question for a moment and then gives him the brilliant smile Thais often use as a polite way of saying no.

She closes the door in his face and throws the lock.