A Nail Through the Heart

33

If I had a to-do list, Rafferty thinks, it wouldn't have a single thing crossed out.

In two days he's made no progress at all. Arthit hasn't found a scrap of data on Doughnut in any of the city's databases. The battered guard from Madame Wing's hasn't set foot outside his apartment. Chouk Ran has not contacted Madame Wing.

Doughnut has not called.

The forgery of the deed to Madame Wing's house has been made and one copy sent to her, but nothing has happened to bring it into play.

When Rose comes home from Bangkok Domestics with the news that two of her women have gotten jobs, but also reports that the woman who runs the business had treated her with contempt, it is almost a relief for Rafferty to pick up the phone and methodically take the woman apart. When he is finished, Superman is regarding him with raised eyebrows that signal something like admiration.

While Miaow was at school, Rafferty played Tetris on his computer with Superman and suffered one humiliating defeat after another. The boy could see patterns faster than Rafferty could blink. It wouldn't have been so bad if the kid hadn't laughed, an irritating roosterlike sound, every time Rafferty made a mistake.

"Not so long ago," Rafferty said in English, "I'd have given anything to hear you laugh. Now I'd give anything if you stopped."

The distraction of the computer gave Rafferty the time he needed to be able to look at Superman without seeing the battered, violated boy in the cheap hotel room. By the fourteenth straight loss, Rafferty could meet the boy's eyes.

While Rafferty stewed over the lack of progress, the boy fixed the garbage disposal, the toaster, the stuck window, the light switch in Miaow's room, the light leaks around the air conditioner, and the combination mechanism on Rafferty's suitcase, which had been permanently locked. He also eradicated the stain on the carpet, to Rose's obvious pleasure.

Rafferty and Rose did not discuss their situation, but there was a lightness to her-in her bearing, in her voice-that made Rafferty smile at inappropriate moments. Superman took to imitating him, which Miaow found hilarious.

On the third night, Rose went home to clean her own place, and without her to provide moral and nutritional guidance, Rafferty took the kids to McDonald's, and they ate their recommended allowance of fat for the decade. On the walk home, he told them the story about the Three Little Pigs, changing it so it ended with a recipe for roast pork. Superman thought the new ending was funny. Miaow didn't.

Rafferty talked them through the crowded sidewalk, improvising a plan to write a fairy-tale cookbook: soap-flavored bread crumbs that children could drop behind them in the woods without the birds eating them, a low-calorie gingerbread house, a wolf's stew with boiled grandmother. Superman made a few contributions, but Miaow walked silently between them. When Rafferty laughed aloud at something the boy suggested, she moved around to Rafferty's other side, so he was in the middle. Accepting the hint, Rafferty let his hand drop lightly onto the back of the boy's neck. Superman gave a tiny start and stopped talking in midword, but he did not move away, and a moment later he picked up where he'd left off.

Rafferty felt like he'd just won a marathon.

They got home and settled happily in the living room, although it felt a little emptier without Rose. Miaow began to cut out the figures from her drawings and paste them together in new combinations, and Rafferty suffered a few more grueling defeats at Tetris. At nine o'clock he put the kids to bed and curled up on the couch with his gun.

He decided he'd had a wonderful day.

Surfacing abruptly from sleep, he answers the wrong phone first, saying hello to the dial tone while the cell phone continues to bleat from across the room. The only light is the city's diffuse glow through the sliding glass door, and he barks his shin on the corner of the coffee table on his way to grab the phone.

"Hello." He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to focus his attention.

There is a silence. He thinks he can hear traffic in the background.

"Hello," he says again. "What time is it anyway?"

After a moment a woman's voice says, "Three."

It is an unfamiliar voice, self-possessed and pleasant but reserved, as though its owner is unsure whether to say anything more. Rafferty has to relax his hand on the phone. He is gripping it tightly enough to snap the hinge.

"Hello, Doughnut," he says.

At first he thinks she will hang up, but then she says, "Why did I keep the disks?" To his surprise, her English is excellent.

"Because you're on them," Rafferty says. He grabs a breath and makes the leap he has been considering ever since "You and your sister."

He hears a short, reflexive grunt, as though someone has poked her in the gut. "You looked at the others."

"Yes."

"Did you enjoy them?" She drags out the word as though it exerts friction in her throat.

"They're the worst things I ever saw. They set a whole new standard for awful."

"You had to be there," she says. "You want to talk to me. Talk."

"Face-to-face."

"Why?"

"I want to see you. I need to see who you are."

"I'm a girl," she says. "There's nothing unusual about me."

"Oh," Rafferty says, "I think there is."

A siren goes by in the background, and a moment later he hears it in the street below. She is very near.

"I'll call you," she says. The line goes dead.

Rafferty tiptoes down the hall and looks into Miaow's room. Both children are out cold, the boy snoring softly in the top bunk. His sheet, as always, is on the floor. Rafferty covers him gently and goes into his own room to get dressed.

Silom Road is dark and deserted and insubstantial, the bustle and energy of the day long behind. Shop windows are dim. The neon signs are just drab squiggles in glass. The few lighted windows are five or six stories up, where apartment dwellers face their own sleepless nights. He walks several blocks, looking for a pay phone, before he decides that the quality of the connection made it more likely Doughnut was using a cellular. He keeps walking, aimlessly now, covering another block or two before a tuk-tuk pulls optimistically to the curb, although he has not signaled it.

"Where?" the driver says, gunning the motor happily. He is chubby and cheerful-looking, with a fat mole on his chin that sprouts black hairs long enough for knot practice. The Buddha's belly below the handlebars is tightly sheathed in a T-shirt covered in children's handprints in bright primary colors.

When the Buddha sends you a tuk-tuk, Rafferty thinks, it's probably a sign that you should go somewhere. "That way." He indicates the direction in which he is walking and climbs in. The driver pops the clutch, and Rafferty's back slams the back of the seat.

As he accelerates, the driver catches Rafferty studying his face in the rearview mirror and gives him a grin that is extremely rich in gums. "Where we go, boss?"

"Suppose I killed somebody," Rafferty says, watching the man's grin slip. "Where would I put the body?"

He gets a quick lift of the head: The answer is obvious. "Klong Toey. Everybody use Klong Toey."

"But the police would find it if I left it in Klong Toey."

The man purses his lips. "River," he says.

Rafferty says, "But where? Somebody would see me if I dropped it over a bridge."

"Small soi, not so many houses. Better than a bridge."

"Show me."

"How many place you want to see?"

"How many can you show me?"

A shrug. "Ten, fifteen."

"How do you know where they are?"

"Police find a body," the driver says. "Everybody comes to look. They need tuk-tuks."

"Okay, show me the best place. Near Pratunam."

Within twenty minutes Rafferty has seen six places, all within an easy drive from Claus Ulrich's apartment, from which a weighted body could have been dropped into the Chao Phraya unobserved. He and the driver sit musing, the little two-stroke engine popping away, as the river glides by, its waters a thick reddish brown, opaque with silt carried down from the north. There could be a sunken city two feet beneath the surface, Rafferty thinks, and no one would ever know it. Cup water in your hands and you couldn't see your palms.

"He was a very big man," he says aloud, without realizing he is speaking.

"Wrap him in a big sheet," the driver suggests. He became voluble when he realized Rafferty could speak Thai, and he has entered completely into the spirit of this hypothetical murder. He twists the hairs growing out of his mole as inspiration strikes. "Dye it black so you can carry it at night."

"That's good, but getting him here…She's just one woman, and I don't think she's a big one."

The driver pulls a packet of Krong Thip cigarettes from his shirt pocket and fires one up. "Cut him in pieces."

The stains on the bathroom floor. "Make four or five trips carrying an arm, a leg? That's a lot of back-and-forth. Somebody would notice."

"Boyfriend," the driver proposes instantly. "Kill fat husband, get help from skinny boyfriend."

"Could be." Up until now he has always seen Doughnut acting alone. On the other hand, there were the four men who beat him up in the soi.

There is a pause while they both think, and then the driver says, "Good man, bad man?"

"Very bad man."

The driver's face glows red from the coal on his cigarette. "So no problem. One bad person dead. Plenty left."

This is an argument Rafferty has been getting a lot of. "Let's go home." He is suddenly light-headed from lack of sleep. He has a disorienting sensation of motion, as though the river were still and they were gliding sideways.

By the time he walks into the apartment, it is four-thirty. The kids are still asleep, Superman's sheet once more on the floor. He picks it up and covers the boy again, and Superman stirs and his eyes half open. Rafferty is startled by how fast he moves. Within less than a second, he is curled against the wall, knees drawn up protectively, glaring at Rafferty. His teeth are bared.

"No problem," Rafferty says. He takes a step back. "You dropped your sheet."

The boy looks down at the sheet and then up at Rafferty. The tautness slowly goes out of his face, and he nods. He covers himself and stretches out again but keeps his eyes open and fixed on Rafferty's face.

"Go to sleep," Rafferty says, in what he hopes is a fatherly tone. He leaves the room and closes the door all the way so Superman can hear the latch click home.

He makes a silent cup of Nescafe and sips at it. Grim as sin. The Nescafe performs the desired sabotage on his central nervous system, and Madame Wing makes an unexpected appearance in his mind's eye.

What had she looked like when she was younger? She is thin in a way that says she has never been fat: she has the gauntness of someone whose appetites have nothing to do with food. She would have had those terrifying eyes even then, set into a face that was young and old at the same time; she would never have shone with the soft flush of youth. Even at eighteen, he thinks, she would look like someone who had never been out of doors, who had never shared a secret, who had never lost her heart. She has the face of an animal with multiple sets of teeth.

A whole new kind of hatred, Arthit had said. Collect ten million baht, shred it, and return it, just to cause her pain. The pain more important than the profit.

Claus Ulrich had probably inspired a new kind of hatred, too.

He is assuming Ulrich is dead.

Suppose he's not, though. Uncle Claus has demonstrated a talent for living inconspicuously, although his weight makes him a conspicuous man. But if a ghost were to appear from his past, a grown and dangerous version of someone he never thought could be a threat to him, someone he saw as a passive object, to be tormented at will-what would he do? Wouldn't a man like Claus Ulrich have a bolt-hole handy in case someone like Doughnut did appear? Or would he even recognize her? Twenty years in the same city is a long time, no matter how reclusive you are. He could have encountered dozens of them by now, grown up beyond recognition.

But they would remember him.

Five cups of coffee later, Rafferty is still on the couch, Miaow has left for school, and the phone finally rings. He grabs the receiver, expecting it to be Doughnut. Instead it is Arthit.

"Get a motorcycle taxi," he says. "Take your cell phone. Your guard is on the move."