A Nail Through the Heart

20

Tam's widow, Mai, is one of the most beautiful human beings Rafferty has ever seen. Her eyes-puffy now from crying-tilt upward above an extraordinary pair of cheekbones, smooth enough to have been shaped by running water. Her nose is delicate and finely formed. She wears her black hair chopped short to reveal a swan's neck and collarbones as refined as an angel's wings. The tilted eyes are a light brown with flecks of gold buried in them. She is the color of weak tea, with a hint of heat just beneath the skin.

"He was the sweetest man," she is saying. "He even loved my mother." The memory of his sweetness brings the tissue back up to her eyes. The floor of the neat little apartment, a concrete cube as brightly decorated as a doll's house, is littered with tight balls of Kleenex from the box on the table in front of her. The woman has been crying for hours.

"I'm sure your mother-" Rafferty begins helplessly, demonstrating all his skill with female grief.

"My mother is a dragon," Mai says. She wads up the latest Kleenex and throws it at the carpet. It rolls up against the television, and Rafferty sees, on top of the big, old-fashioned set, a color photo of her and Tam, framed in teak. They look young and radiant and secure. The world has just been waiting for their arrival to make it complete. Nothing bad will ever happen to them.

Through the window above the TV set, Rafferty can see the sloping corrugated-iron roofs that keep the rain out of a rambling cluster of squatters' shacks. The building in which Mai lived with Tam is a modest apartment house in aggressively unadorned Soviet cement, obviously put up ten or twelve years ago in the expectation that the neighborhood would somehow mysteriously gentrify. The occupants of the shacks, only a couple of dilapidated miles from the alley where Tam's body was found, have apparently not gotten the news, or perhaps the general or police captain who owns the land is waiting for a better offer before he calls in the bulldozers. The result is a representative square of the Bangkok patchwork: poverty, aspiration, and affluence, jammed side by side, kings next to deuces as though a pack of cards has been thrown into the air. Beyond the shimmering iron of the shacks' roofs, the broad brown ribbon of the Chao Phraya winds its way to the Gulf of Thailand.

"I told him to stop," Mai says. She puts a hand on top of her head, as though to keep it from exploding. "I told him to do something else. I begged him, told him we didn't need the money, it wasn't worth the risk. He was so proud of what he could do. 'Top two percent,' he kept saying. 'It's all in the fingers.' Like he was a magician or a violin player, not a criminal." She stops, blinks. "The Cambodian man was a violin player."

"He was?"

"Well, he said he was. That's one reason Tam took the job." She dabs at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Tam said they were both artists."

"Did you tell that to the police?"

"I didn't believe it," she says. "I asked how he could play the violin with a hand that looked like a spider. Tam said he didn't even have fingernails. They'd been pulled out."

"Oh," Rafferty says, putting his own hands in his pockets.

"And his name, that was a lie, too. Chon. It's not even a real name. It sounds like something somebody made up who had heard Thai spoken on the radio." She has worked a fingernail into the seam of the couch cushion and is slowly slitting it open. A little bubble of foam rubber bulges out. "A violin player with a fake name. The Saudi jewels. How could he have been so stupid?" A sob catches in her throat and sends her free hand to the Kleenex box, but the one on top has failed to pop up, and she takes both hands and rips the box in half. Tissues flutter to the floor. "What am I going to do?"

"Do you-" He stops. "Do you have any money?" A fat fold of Madame Wing's fills his pocket.

The sob tails off into a sniffle, followed by a dab at her nose. "Money's no problem. I have a job. I've always had a job. What I don't have is a husband."

"Are there…um, are there children?"

"He was my child." She begins to weep again. "He was my child and my father and my husband. He surrounded me. I don't even know where I am anymore." She grabs a handful of tissues angrily and scrubs her face with them, then balls them up and tosses the wad, hard, at the window. "Are you married?"

"Not at the moment."

"Then you don't know anything," she says, not unkindly.

"I know I can find the man who did this to you."

She looks up at him, evaluating the worth of the offer. He has not taken a chair, although she offered him one. It seems impolite to do anything but stand in the presence of such sorrow. So there he stands, shambling and ill at ease, the duffel bag full of burglar tools sitting heavily at his feet like a sleeping dog. "It won't bring him back."

"No. Nothing will bring him back."

She exhales for what seems like a minute, so long that Rafferty half expects her to disappear. "Why bother, then?"

"Because it's wrong," Rafferty says. "Because he killed your husband and made you unhappy. Because somebody should make him pay."

She shrugs, and it seems to require all her energy. "He'll pay for it in a future life."

"I'd like to make him pay for it in this one. While I'm around to watch."

"Why? What does this mean to you? We don't even know you."

"I'm tired of death. And I'm sick of deaths no one can do anything about. Nobody can take revenge on a wave. It's just a wave. Even if you wanted to for some reason, you couldn't find the water that formed the wave, could you? It's disappeared back into the ocean. But a man isn't a wave." He realizes he has raised his voice and makes a conscious effort to lower it. "You can find a man."

She is still, toying with a new Kleenex. Then, slowly, she tears it in half. "If you say so."

"Do you know where they met?"

"In jail. Tam did something stupid, and they put him in jail. They were in the same cell just before he was released."

"How many in the cell?"

"I don't know. Eight, ten. What difference does it make?"

Rafferty pulls out his notebook. "It could give me a name. When was he in jail? When did he get out? Which jail?"

She closes her eyes, sealing herself off while she works through some private process. Then she sighs deeply and gets up from the couch.

"I'll get my journal," she says.