A Nail Through the Heart

30

He can hear her screams even while he is talking with the guard at the gate. Pak meets him halfway up the drive, dripping sweat, with panic widening his eyes. They head toward the house at a run.

"What is it?"

"She will tell you." Pak is out of breath. He has to fight to get the words out. The back of his jacket is soaked with perspiration.

The front door stands open, light pouring out into the night. Pak leads him to the right, toward the screams. "You must be patient with her," he says over his shoulder. "Madame is in an excitable state."

"Thanks for the bulletin."

They enter the small room where he first met Madame Wing. She is crumpled in her wheelchair with her knees drawn up to her shoulders, looking as angular and insubstantial as a swatted spider. A blanket covers the lower half of her body. Two enormous male servants are in the room, their heads bowed, as Madame Wing pours her fury on them, a shrill stream high enough to make dogs howl. When Rafferty comes in, she breaks off and gives him a glare that is intended to nail him to the wall.

"You," she spits. "What have you been doing? What earthly good are you? Your mother should have aborted you."

"I'm fine, thanks," Rafferty says. "And you?"

"Idiot. You took my money and you have done nothing. I placed my faith in you-"

"And I identified the man who robbed you in less than twenty-four hours. By the way, his name is Chouk Ran."

"A lot of good that does. A name." She almost chokes on the word. "What use is a fucking name? I need that man's skin."

The hell with it, Rafferty thinks. Take the fifteen K and walk.

She strikes at the arms of her wheelchair with the gnarled hands as though she could beat the truth out of it. "He made a demand," she snarls. "He had the effrontery to make a demand. If you had done your job-"

"When did the demand come?"

She breaks off, her mouth open and quivering. She swallows loudly enough to be heard across the room. "Early this morning."

"Excuse me? Did you say early this morning?"

"Are you deaf as well as useless?"

"No, I'm just having a little trouble believing my ears. I thought you said it came early this morning-"

"That is what I said-"

"— and, see, that doesn't make sense, because I know you would have called me. Since I'm working on this for you, remember? It would have been stupid not to call."

Pak inhales sharply behind him.

Madame Wing stares at him with something like disbelief. Finally she says, in a tone so cold he can almost see her breath cloud, "You were not needed."

"Apparently I was. Or am I missing something? He made a demand, and you met it, and he kept what he stole from you. Something along those lines?"

"Mr. Rafferty-" Pak begins, but Madame Wing silences him with a look.

"Yes," she says. She is watching him, the dark eyes flat and still as a snake's.

"What did he want?"

The steel returns to her voice. "Ten million baht."

"And you sent it to him. Who took it?"

Her mouth twists as though she would spit at his feet. "A maid," she says.

"Bring her."

"That is not necessary."

Rafferty is suddenly so angry his throat is almost blocked. "How about this? How about bring her or I leave?"

She blinks as though she has received a blow to the face. "Leave?"

"Go home. Send your fucking money back and let you deal with this yourself."

For a moment Rafferty thinks Madame Wing will fly out of her wheelchair and straight at him, but instead she settles back and, in a voice like a grinding knife, says to Pak, "Get her."

"Did he send you anything?" Rafferty asks when Pak is gone.

"Oh, yes," she says. "He sent me something." She reaches beneath the blanket on her lap and withdraws an envelope. She holds it out, and he crosses the room and takes it from her. Her hand is shaking for the first time. In the envelope are three sheets of cardboard, very much like the ones that came in the shirts he bought for Superman.

"And I'm correct in assuming that this was not what he stole."

"Do not bait me, Mr. Rafferty. Better people than you have tried."

"I'm not afraid of you. Whoever you are, you're not used to people who hit back."

She coils herself deeper in the chair, but before she can reply, she suddenly registers that the other two servants are still in the room. "Out," she snaps. They practically collide in their eagerness to leave.

"Did Chouk pick up the money himself?" Rafferty asks before she can launch into whatever she was going to say.

She is looking at him as though she is trying to guess his weight. "It would seem so."

"How did he do it?"

Grudgingly at first and then with mounting fury, she tells him about the taxis and the cell phone.

"It sounds like he's alone," Rafferty says, working it through. "There's nothing he would have needed a partner for. He gets into a taxi and pays it to wait on the boulevard for two or three hours before the maid is supposed to come out. He's looking for a setup. He writes down the plate numbers of the cars that seem to be idling around, if any are. Then, when the maid gets into her taxi, he follows for an hour or so to make sure there's no one behind him, and then he calls her and tells her where to stop."

"What could you have done about it?"

He studies the bas-relief for a moment, not really seeing it. "Well, off the top of my head, I would have been in a private car with a driver, a few blocks away. The maid would have had two cell phones, one I could call on and the one he gave her, so he would never get a busy signal. She would have called me the moment she was in the cab, so I could hit the street just as she pulled away. I would have changed cars once or twice so I wouldn't be spotted, and called her to find out where they were so I could direct my driver. I suppose there's a small chance that they might have made the exchange when I wasn't around, but not much of one."

After a moment she says in a withering tone, "Pak did not think of this."

"Yeah," Rafferty says, "and neither did you."

He hears people enter the room behind him and turns to see Pak, trailed by a plump maid with a blunt-chopped schoolgirl's haircut, no more than eighteen or nineteen years old. She wears a black skirt and white blouse, and she is hanging her head. It is not until she lifts her chin that he sees the quivering jaw and, above it, the bandages.

One eye is completely swathed in white adhesive, with the puffy edges of a cotton pad peeping out from beneath it. The bandages continue down both cheeks, all the way to her jawline. One slants white across her nose. Above the bandages on the left side of her face are two long, red gouges, scored deep into the defenseless tissue and stained with iodine. Her eyes skitter toward him for an instant and then drop to the floor.

Rafferty turns to Madame Wing, feeling the tightness come back to his neck and shoulders. "Did you do this?"

Madame Wing's chin comes up, and the corners of her mouth pull down. "And if I did?"

"Then you're an appalling old bitch." Pak lays a hand on his shoulder, and Rafferty pivots quickly and knocks it off. "Don't touch me again unless you want a lot of stuff to get broken." To Madame Wing he says, "Who the fuck do you think you are, the empress dowager?"

"Mr. Rafferty," Pak says.

"I'm going to work this out," he says, his voice ragged with anger, "but not because of you. Because a Thai safecracker named Tam got killed by your Mr. Chouk, and he had a very sweet wife whose heart was broken by it. And thanks for telling me about the dead man. You can pay me or not, I don't give a shit. I never want to lay eyes on you again." He wheels around and says to Pak, "Get out of my way."

"Stop, Mr. Rafferty," Madame Wing says. "Please stop."

"I don't brake for assholes."

"You want to solve this, don't you? For whoever it was. Then you have to see what else he sent me."

He turns back to her in spite of himself. "What?"

"You'll be interested," she says acidly. "Follow me."

She wheels herself past Pak, past Rafferty, and through the door, the wheelchair making its trapped-animal squeal. Rafferty tracks her down a long hallway into a spacious, formal room. On the floor of the room are two large, open suitcases. At first Rafferty thinks they are full of rags. Then he looks more closely and inhales so sharply he starts to cough.

"Ten million baht," Madame Wing says. "Shredded."

He hears a rustle of paper behind him, but he can't stop looking at the shredded money, ten million baht cut into narrow, worthless strips. "He also sent this," Madame Wing says.

He tears his eyes away from the suitcase to see her holding out a sheet of cheap notebook paper. It is written in a language he cannot read, just a few short words, a single line of flowing script.

"What does it say?"

She looks up at him with those luminous nocturnal eyes. "It says 'I want the deed to your house.'"

He looks back at the spirals of paper, worthless now. Trying to measure the amount of hate in the gesture. Against all his instincts, he realizes, he wants to know more about that hate.

He says, "Give me the deed."