A Nail Through the Heart

22

The bang the door makes when it strikes the wall is louder than the cannon in the 1812 Overture and has even more impact than Rafferty had meant it to have. Its effect on the woman behind the desk at Bangkok Domestics is galvanic: She goes two feet straight into the air and lands standing. Now she waits, with her fingertips over her mouth and her back to the filing cabinet, keeping the desk between them.

"You lied to me." Rafferty grabs the desk by its edge and tilts it a couple of feet, spilling papers to the floor. He lets it drop with a loud thump that prompts a second instant levitation, this one backward as well as vertical, driving her all the way to the wall. "You told me Ulrich's maid was killed. That's bullshit." The woman's eyes slide past him to the wall and search it frantically. "She's working downstairs. Probably a job you got her. You want to tell me why?"

A little defensive tug downward on the jacket of today's suit, a yellow the color of congealing butter. Her eyes drop to the spill of papers at her feet. "You have no right to speak to me like this."

Rafferty takes a folder from the desk. "Claus Ulrich is probably dead, do you realize that?" He slaps the folder onto the desk on the word "dead." "He's not some impoverished laborer, he's a rich foreigner." Slap, slap. The muscles around her eyes bunch up each time, and her fingernails pick at a peel of skin on her lower lip. "He has an embassy, for Christ's sake." Slap. "What do you think they're going to do? How high do you think the cops are going to jump when they get the call? You think they're going to question you politely, maybe over dinner or something? What kind of trouble do you want to be in anyway?"

"I…I just," she says. She is watching the folder, hoping it stays in the air. "My business…"

"Your business is the least of your worries. This girl was stalking this man, and you knew it. And you helped her get to him." Slap, slap. "Then, when I asked you what happened, you lied to me. Where do you think all this is going?"

"I…I don't know."

"Here's where it's going." He shifts to the left, as though he is going to come around the desk, and she dodges away. "If you don't want to see a picture of yourself wearing handcuffs in the Bangkok Post, you'll tell me what happened, and you'll do it right now."

Her fingers come away from her mouth to tug at a large button. She licks her lower lip where she picked at it. "She…ah, she paid me."

"Yeah, yeah, I already figured that out. Give me details."

Now the fingers have hold of each other, twisting as though she is trying to find new ways to bend them. "It's just that we-I mean, I-"

"She came in here a few months ago. With money." Another slap of the file.

"A lot." She swallows.

"What's a lot?"

The hand comes up with all the fingers spread to indicate five. "Five thousand dollars. Two hundred thousand baht."

Rafferty sits in the visitor's chair. "Sit down. Now. Keep talking."

The woman feels her way to her chair as though the room is pitch-black and lowers herself into it very carefully. "She…well, she said she wanted to work for Mr. Ulrich. I explained that we don't do things that way. She said procedures could always be changed, and she began to put money on my desk."

"And?"

"And she…she said she was sure I could find a way. She had all this money in her lap, and she kept putting bundles of it on the desk."

"Business any good?" Rafferty asks, looking up at the photos of happier times.

"Terrible. We've been on the verge of closing forever. The economic crisis, and there are so many agencies now. Every month we say we can't go on, and every month we do anyway."

"So you needed the money," Rafferty says.

"Desperately. We still do."

"And here she was," he offers, "loaded with cash."

The blink he gets could be gratitude or just relief. "I told her she needed a domestic reference to get a job with Mr. Ulrich. I couldn't give her a false reference, because Mr. Ulrich was sure to check, do you see? And while she was sitting here, Madame-you know, Madame-called and said she needed somebody strong and stupid. Those were her exact words, somebody strong and stupid. And I said I might have the person for her, and I covered the phone and told the girl what Madame…uh, Madame Wing had said, and she said, 'I can be strong and stupid.' I told Madame Wing I had a girl for her, but she demanded to see three or four. I was trying to talk her out of it when the girl passed me a note she had written. It said, 'Tell her you're so certain this is the right girl that you won't even charge a fee.'"

"And Madame Wing went for it."

A nod. "She worked there a few weeks and got herself fired, which is easy to do in that house, and then she actually stood up to her and got herself a reference. I couldn't believe it," she says, shaking her head. "Nobody stands up to Madame Wing."

"But there was still Ulrich's first maid. Noot."

The woman shakes her head, in the negative this time. "Doughnut had already talked to Noot; that was how she got my name. Noot had wanted to quit for a long time. Mr. Ulrich is apparently…ah, peculiar. So I got Noot the job with Mr. Choy, who was happy to steal her. Mr. Ulrich is not well liked in that apartment house."

"Just so we're clear," Rafferty says, "you are in this up to your neck."

A wince, as though he had swung at her. "So after Noot quit, I told Mr. Ulrich the same thing I told Madame Wing. I'd send him one girl, and if he took her, there'd be no fee."

"Do you know where she is now?"

Her head is going side to side before he finishes the question. "No idea."

"Didn't you wonder why she was so eager? Didn't it worry you? She had obviously been watching the man, or she wouldn't have known who Noot was. She could have been up to anything."

"She's just a girl."

"So was Lizzie Borden. There had to be some kind of connection between them."

The woman looks down at her desk, possibly trying to work out who Lizzie Borden is. "I asked her about that. She said that Mr. Ulrich would understand it when it was time."

"I wonder if he did." Rafferty pulls the guest chair closer to the desk. The woman flinches. "Anything more? Anything at all?"

"No. That's all. That's everything."

"Okay, phase two." Rafferty takes out his notepad and writes a phone number on it and then slides it over to her. Then he reaches in his pocket and begins to peel off hundred-dollar bills. Her eyes are glued to the money.

"This is twenty-five hundred dollars," he says, dropping it on the desk. "You earn it by calling the woman whose number I've just given you and saying you'll get some of her girls work. There are thirteen of them. You get an additional twenty-five hundred dollars when they're all employed and you've worked out an arrangement with this woman so that she gets part of the employment fee and she can send you more girls in the future. She's going to be your main supplier."

"But the girls. Who are they? Where do they come from?"

"They've all been working in the hospitality industry. And they'll all have a reference. From me."

"I don't know," says the woman, her eyes still on the money.

"You know the old saying about the carrot and the stick?"

"An English expression. Yes."

"This is the carrot," he says, flicking the stack of money. "The stick is a real motherfucker."

"Arthit?" Rafferty says into the cell phone as the tuk-tuk plods along Sukhumvit Road, congested as always. Robed Arabs glide along the sidewalk, so they must be near the Grace Hotel. "Tam's wife says the Cambodian was a violinist."

"So find him. Maybe you can get him to play 'Melancholy Baby.'"

"I need the names of the people who were in the jail cell with Tam. Surely only one or two of them were Cambodian. Names, mug shots, booking info."

"Fax it to the RCMP?" Arthit says in a much brisker tone. Someone has obviously come into his office.

"Attention of Lieutenant Rafferty."

"I think that should be 'Leftenant,'" Arthit says.

"The missing maid was a setup. Paid her way into Madame Wing's employ."

"Do you think she was involved in what happened at Klong Toey?"

"I don't know. Somebody was inside, because they knew where to dig for the safe. One neat hole, no false starts. I'm pretty sure it was the guard, though. I don't think Doughnut was there long enough to know anything about it. Also, anyone can see that the guard had something to do with it."

"Why is that?"

"One look will tell you. There's no way this happened the way he said it did."

"Noted, Leftenant." Arthit hangs up.

The tuk-tuk makes a two-wheeled left into a little soi and slows as Rafferty reads addresses. The building he wants is featureless gray concrete, six stories high, with windows no wider than archery slits. Washing hangs on poles protruding from the windows. One look tells Rafferty the building will not have an elevator. "Wait here," he says to the tuk-tuk driver, handing him two hundred baht. "I'll be out in ten, fifteen minutes."

The fired guard lives on the fifth floor. Rafferty is winded and sweating when he comes out of the stairwell into a narrow, uncarpeted hallway featuring grime-gray walls patterned with the prints of dirty hands. A single fluorescent bulb sheds light the color of skim milk. The veins on the back of Rafferty's hand stand out like a map of blue highways as he knocks on the door.

Nothing. He knocks, waits some more. No response, no sound from inside. No telltale darkening of the peephole positioned at eye level. He knocks a third time, just for form's sake, and then tears a page from his notebook and writes on it in a child's Thai, handwriting that Miaow would ridicule. What he writes is, "Talk to me or I'll tell Madame Wing about the rock." He puts his name and phone number at the bottom of the page, folds it in half, and slips it between the door and the jamb, at eye level so it will be seen by anyone who opens the door.

The tuk-tuk is at the curb, the driver asleep at the wheel. The shift in the vehicle's weight as Rafferty climbs in wakes him, and he blinks a couple of times and says, "Where?"

Rafferty pages through his notebook, finds the record of his talk with Madame Wing. There it is: the maid's sister's address, for whatever it's worth. But it's too late to go all the way to Banglamphoo. "Silom," Rafferty says. "Around Soi 8."

"You go all over," the driver observes conversationally, pulling away from the curb.

"I am a stone," Rafferty says mystically. "I go where I am kicked." He settles back. "Right now I'm being kicked to a department store."