A Nail Through the Heart

27

The man who stands in the door wears a pair of loose shorts in a dull pumpkin color that goes nicely with the yellowing bruises on his upper body and his face. He has bumps and cuts everywhere, his nose has probably been broken, and one eye is swollen tightly shut. Gashes-rips, really, they're too ragged to be called gashes-mark his face and shoulders in a violent calligraphy. The dark skin over his ribs is blotched with welts.

"You got my note."

The man nods and grabs his neck in pain.

"Pak did this?" Rafferty asks.

The man looks past him into the corridor to make sure Rafferty has come alone, and then he nods again. "Pak and some others," he says. Two of his front teeth have been broken. When he pronounces an s, he whistles.

"How long did they work on you?" Rafferty is speaking Thai.

"One hour, two hours, I don't know."

Rafferty steps in and closes the door behind him. The bruised man retreats. The apartment is the size of a large closet, hot, with an unpainted concrete floor and one tiny window. A hot plate in the corner serves as a kitchen, and a mat on the floor passes for a bed. Except for a sagging wooden table with a television on it, there is no furniture. Clothes hang from nails driven into the walls, which were painted aquamarine quite a long time ago. The ceiling is high and clouded with cobwebs.

"Did you tell them who the thief was?" Rafferty seats himself on the floor, cross-legged. After a moment of gazing down at him, the man sits, too, grunting with the effort.

He licks his lips and winces as though it stings. "I don't know who it was."

Rafferty lets it pass. "Did they make you help them get rid of the body?"

The man's good eye opens in alarm. "What body?"

"Tam's," Rafferty says, as if it were self-evident. "The safecracker."

"No body," the man says. He is looking at a spot above Rafferty's head.

"We'll get along a lot better if you just assume I know everything," Rafferty says. "I'm talking about the body you found in or near the hole they dug. The Thai man who had been shot, once, in the back. The guy who actually opened the safe while the Cambodian-What's his name?"

The man studies him with the open eye but says nothing.

"Chouk," Rafferty says, seeing the eye skitter away. "While Chouk stood over him."

"I don't know Chouk," the man says. His voice has a thin, rippling edge to it, as though he doesn't have enough breath to support it.

"Of course you do. You let him onto the property. Or maybe you know him as Chon."

"You should go," the man says, starting to rise.

"You should have made him hit you for real," Rafferty says, putting a hand on the man's shoulder and forcing him back down. It is pathetically easy to do. "What happened? Did he forget? Or did you go away while he was working and come back after he left?"

"He did hit me," the man says insistently. He leans forward and parts his hair to show Rafferty a nasty-looking wound on his scalp. "He hit me from behind, with a rock."

"Let's talk about the rock," Rafferty says.

The guard closes his eyes. "The rock?"

"Here's the way I figure it happened: You were on duty at the pier, vigilant as always. He pulled his boat in while your back was turned and tied it to the pier, and then he crept up the pier while your back was still turned, and then he went all the way across the lawn while your other back was turned, and he grabbed a stone from a row of them edging a flower bed, and then he crept all the way back down the lawn, while your back was turned, and hit you on the head with the rock. While all your backs were turned. Something like that?"

The man has paled. He opens his eyes and pats his bare chest, as though checking a pocket for cigarettes.

"You're not wearing a shirt," Rafferty reminds him.

"Cigarette," the man says. It is a croak.

Rafferty extends an empty hand and tilts it side to side to say he doesn't have any. "You want a glass of water?"

"Never." The man shudders. "I'll never drink water again."

"Pak didn't notice the rock," Rafferty says. "Nobody knows about it except you and me."

"I need to think," the man says.

"Want me to go down and get you some cigarettes while you work it out?"

"No. Yes."

"My treat," Rafferty says. He got up. "Just make sure you're here when I get back, because if you're not, Madame Wing is going to be very upset with you."