A Nail Through the Heart

39

The fragrance of the flowers is so overpowering, Rafferty thinks, that it ought to tint the air-perhaps salmon, with halos of pink around the naked bulbs dangling from the bare electrical cords high overhead. The perfume seems thick enough to foam around his feet as he pushes his way through it, with two of the men in front of him and two behind.

There are obviously people here and there, but none in sight. The rows of flowers are too high, the aisles between them too narrow. He can hear voices occasionally, the energetic back-and-forth of bargaining, frequent bursts of laughter.

The five of them stop in front of a volcano of orchids taller than Rafferty. The small dark man, who has been directly behind Rafferty, steps forward and puts out a hand. He looks almost apologetic.

"Skip it," Rafferty says.

"Those are the rules."

"Make new ones."

The man takes the gun from his bag, shows it to Rafferty, then drops it back in and zips the bag tightly shut. He walks several yards away and places the bag on a display table beneath a spray of exotic flowers that look like they evolved to snatch bats in midflight. Then he comes back and raises his arms to shoulder height, inviting Rafferty to pat him down. "Do you want to check us? Lift your shirts," he says to the others.

"Skip it. So I can see you haven't got guns? You'll have one when I give you mine, won't you?"

"Look around," the small man says. "This is a public place. Everybody in Bangkok who wants flowers is here."

"Compromise," Rafferty says. He slides the automatic free of his trousers, pops the clip, and hands the clip to the small dark man. Holding the gun between thumb and forefinger, he lets it dangle harmlessly in the air. "That's the only clip," he says. "Trust me."

"I don't actually have to." The dark man hikes his pant leg to show Rafferty a small automatic tucked into an ankle holster and then he grins like a small boy doing a magic trick.

"On the other hand," Rafferty says, bringing the barrel of the gun up beneath the man's chin, "there's still the one under the hammer. Jesus. Every time you think mankind has evolved, you get slapped in the face with a dead fish."

"Tell me about it," says a voice from behind him. A woman.

"Soon as he gives me his gun."

She sighs. "Do you really think we'd bring you here to kill you?"

"It doesn't seem efficient. If I know anything about you, it's that you're efficient."

"You came all this way," Doughnut says, with the sorely tried air of someone forced to state the obvious. "We might as well talk."

"The clip," Rafferty says. "These things cost money."

The man slowly hands it over, watches with total concentration as Rafferty slips the clip back in and secures the automatic beneath his waistband. Then he nods, and Rafferty turns to face Doughnut.

At first glance she is completely unremarkable, someone he would pass on the street and not remember a moment later. He would put her in her forties, but he knows she can't be. The photos on the missing disks were taken toward the end of the eighties, and she must have been ten to twelve at the time, like the other children in the AT Series. She can't be much older than twenty-nine or thirty. After what she has lived through, he thinks, she should look eighty.

Shoulder-length hair, painstakingly parted and brushed, frames a round, somewhat flat face with the low nose and full lips of Isaan. Her skin is dark, unlightened by makeup, its duskiness emphasized by a fine white scar that runs the length of her chin, the result of a slicing wound. She wears the prim pastel clothes of an office lady, a bank teller, someone with a job in the safe world.

The eyes don't look at the safe world. They are black, the purest, deepest black, and they seem to be set several inches behind the face, like those of someone holding up a costume mask and peering through it. Someone with a lot of practice at estimating arm's reach and staying outside it.

She submits patiently to his gaze and then gives him a perfunctory smile that tells him he's looked long enough. "Just a flower seller."

"You're just a flower seller," Rafferty says, "in the same way Joan of Arc was just a farm girl."

She turns without a word and leads him down the aisle, the four men trailing behind, Joan of Arc's soldiers in T-shirts and plastic flip-flops. They make two turns, and Rafferty has no idea what direction they're going in.

"Here," Doughnut says. They have reached a rickety structure, roughly square and no more than ten feet on a side, framed in unfinished lumber. Chicken wire nailed to the uprights turns it into a cage of sorts. A table, four feet square and topped with scarred plywood, tilts alarmingly in the center of the cage. Flowers stretch away in all directions, sullen smears of color. Doughnut opens a plywood door and stands aside. "Okay?"

"And if it weren't?" She follows him in without answering. "Your office?"

"Might be, might not be." She closes the door and takes the seat nearest it. Rafferty takes the seat opposite and sees that the open door concealed a television set wired to a VCR.

"So you're Poke," Doughnut says when she is settled. She beats a quick tattoo on the tabletop with her fingernails. "And you think I'm going to tell you my story."

"It's me or the police." He places a hand on the table, and it dips a couple of inches and rocks up again. One leg too short.

She leans back and puts one arm up, over the back of her chair. "Why would I be afraid of the police?"

He sits opposite her. His chair rocks, too. "Because you killed Claus Ulrich."

Doughnut looks like she is stifling a yawn. "You can prove this?"

"I don't have to. You were there. You disappeared. You left bloodstains. You were in the pictures. For the cops that's a royal flush: means, motive, opportunity."

A golden box of Dunhill cigarettes appears on the table, along with a slender silver lighter, either a Mark Cross or a good knockoff. "The police don't actually need anything. They just manufacture what they don't have." She flips the box open, one-handed. "Why would my story interest you?"

"Because a nice lady came all the way from Australia to learn what happened to Claus, and I told her I'd find out."

She lights up and plumes smoke from her nostrils. "The famous niece, I suppose." She rolls the tip of her cigarette gently on the plywood surface of the table to remove a film of ash. The corners of her mouth go down, her first overt display of emotion. "So she asked you. And you always do what you say you'll do?"

"It makes it easier to get up in the morning."

The four men are arrayed behind her, tallest to shortest, as though they've lined up for a photo, peering in through the chicken wire. She turns to see what he is looking at and waves the men away with the hand holding the cigarette. They melt like gnomes into the flowers. Several moments pass, measured in exhalations of smoke. "Let's see," she says at last. "I have a question for you first. Do you think murder is a crime?"

After the week he has had, there is only one truthful reply. "I used to."

She gazes at the cigarette, turning it in her hand so she can read the gold writing on the filter. "If I killed Claus Ulrich, was that a crime?"

"I saw the pictures," he says.

"So what you're saying is, I tell you my story and then wait while you decide my fate."

Rafferty shifts in the hard chair. "I'm not really comfortable with playing judge."

She smiles slightly at the evasion. "But that's what you're doing."

"I think I'd like a cigarette." He hasn't smoked in almost a year.

She extends the pack and the lighter. "This makes you nervous?" She is very calm.

"I'd smoke used toilet paper to get rid of the smell of these flowers."

"Too much of anything will make you sick," she says. "Unless you're already sick, of course." She watches him light up. The lighter is a real Mark Cross. He turns it over and sees the initials "C.U." engraved in a flowing script, fancy as a minaret. "It was his," she says.

Rafferty turns the lighter over in his hand. "You left an awful lot there. Money, watches, all sorts of stuff. Why take this?"

"I didn't want anything he'd touched. But he used this." Her gaze floats over his left shoulder, unfocused. "Do you remember the red candles?"

"I'll remember them my whole life." The flame haloed in the photographs, the spills of hot wax across the children's abdomens.

"So will I. So will Toom." She meets his eyes and gives him the perfunctory smile again. "My older sister. Toom."

"How did he get his hands on you?"

She regards him for a moment as though he is a distance she will have to cross, and then she sighs. "My mother sold us when I was ten and Toom was twelve," she says. "A lady came from Bangkok and promised my mother she could find us good work in the city. Washing dishes in a restaurant, she said. When we got bigger, we could be waitresses, with uniforms, two for each of us. She showed my mother a big color picture of the uniform. How I wanted to wear those clothes. I still remember exactly what they looked like." She draws a finger down the scar on her chin, and Rafferty would bet she doesn't know she's doing it. "The lady told my mother we could make two or three hundred dollars a month in the restaurant. My father didn't earn two hundred dollars in a year. She offered an advance on our salary. Is any of this new to you?"

People are beginning to move past them, choosing the blooms they will sell in the shops, in the streets. They glance incuriously at the two of them, just a farang and a Thai woman, having a conversation, probably bargaining over the price of flowers. "I know about it in the abstract, as something that happens. As a personal story, it's new."

"I'm aware it's not original. The same thing happened to the other girls in the house."

"What house?"

She shakes her head impatiently. "The one that wasn't a restaurant. Everything that happened to any of us happened to all of us."

Rafferty tries to keep the revulsion out of his voice. "You were ten."

"Almost eleven. And it hurt more than I could believe. But not for long, at least, you know, not down there. I didn't stay eleven for long either. It was interesting. In no time at all, I was older than my sister. Even though she was twelve. She was the one who kept crying. I was the one who decided, as you Americans like to say, 'Fuck this.'"

"You tried to escape?"

"Of course. The first time I didn't even get out of the building. They used wet towels on us. No marks, you see. Customers don't like scarred girls. They hit us until their arms got tired, and then they gave up. Just locked us up. Toom hadn't tried to get away, but they beat her anyway, just to show me what would happen if I did it again."

There is heat inside Rafferty's chest. "Who were they?"

"Two Chinese men. Lee and Kwan. They were brothers and they owned the house, the restaurant, everything. They owned us. After they beat Toom, I decided to wait. I realized I could wait. I learned to live through things. To look at the ceiling, as long as they left me on my back. When they didn't, I looked at the wall, or the floor, or the pillow, if I was someplace fancy enough to have pillows."

"How long did this go on?"

"A year, three months, and two days. I was marking the days on the floor under the bed with a pen I had brought with me from my village. My mother had bought it for me so I could write down people's orders in the restaurant. I was going to smile at them and nod and write down their orders exactly right. They were going to love me."

She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she is gazing at the cigarette in her hand. "Then Claus came along."

Rafferty can see no change in her face, but she has sunk the fingernails of her left hand into the edge of the table. There are bands of white around the knuckles. He waits.

A deep drag, two jets of smoke. "He didn't look any worse than anybody else until I realized that the other girls were hiding. They had disappeared through the doors. Behind the sofa. One of the girls who couldn't get out of the room pissed her pants right there."

"He took you."

She shakes her head. "Actually, that time he took her. Her mistake. He liked piss." She sees him looking at her hand and relaxes it. "He liked pretty much everything, as long as it hurt or humiliated us. I figured out later that what really interested him was hurting us inside. It wasn't enough that we'd bled and been burned and pissed on. We had to feel like we were shit. We had to want to stop living. Some of us tried to."

The scars on Toom's wrist, Rafferty thinks but does not say. Something Chouk Ran said comes to mind. "He put a nail through your heart."

She looks at him, startled. "Yes," she says. "And the person who got up from that bed was never the same again." She passes her fingertips over her cheeks as though she was spreading makeup. "But I didn't know that until he took me." She drops her hand to the table, slides open the pack of cigarettes and extracts one, lights it off the butt in her hand, and drops the butt to the floor. "And I'm not going to talk about it. I promised myself, after I finished with him, that I would never talk about it again. Never think about it again. It was all I'd thought about for most of my life, do you realize that? Most of my fucking life I've been thinking about Claus Ulrich. Anyway, you saw the pictures of the others. There was nothing special about me. It all happened, and it all hurt, and it all took forever, and that's all there was to it, except that he took me again and then again. He was thinking up new things. That's what I thought at the time anyway. It wasn't until years later, when I opened his filing cabinets and saw the videos, that I realized he wasn't even a creative pervert. He just imitated the stuff he imported from Japan."

Her hair, there is something about her hair.

"Such a dull, ordinary man," she says. "You expect beasts to be different, but they're not. They're as boring as everybody else."

"You can't tell anything about anybody," Rafferty says. "You, for instance. Looking at you, no one would ever guess what you've survived." He is studying her hair, the perfection with which it has been brushed. Something stirs inside him.

"Then he took both of us," she says. She watches him for a reaction. "Sisters. Some men like sisters, you know? They like them-together. He made us do things to each other. Sex things. Then…" She falters. Looks down at her lap. He sees that the part in her hair is straight enough to have been cut with a knife.

Like Miaow's.

The perfection of Miaow's part is one of the ways she proves she can control things. He mentally waves the image away, but it persists. "Then what?"

"Then this," she says. "This is something you haven't seen."

She swivels in her chair and turns on the television set. It blossoms into electronic snow until she pushes a button on the remote. "He took a few of these," she says, waiting for the picture. "But the camera was too bulky, and he couldn't work it with a remote, so he had to stop playing with us to make the video." The familiar room blinks onto the screen. "But he took this one because it was special."

The image is mercifully low-resolution, the product of a cheap video camera from more than twenty years ago. A small naked brown girl, barely recognizable as Doughnut, is on the red coverlet. Her wrists have been tied to her ankles, which are separated by metal cuffs with a two-foot rod between them. The bindings open and lift her legs and arms, leaving her splayed and helpless on her back.

A slightly larger girl, also naked, enters the picture from the left. She is already crying.

"Toom," Doughnut says.

Toom sits on the bed next to Doughnut and gently reaches over to smooth her sister's hair, which is plastered with sweat to her face. The camera jumps, and Toom yanks her arm back as though Doughnut were a live wire. Then, jerkily, the camera moves in on the two girls. Doughnut has her eyes closed, and her face is vacant, almost otherworldly, but Toom watches with enormous eyes as the camera advances on her.

A hand comes into the frame, holding a lighted cigar. The hand is shaking, and Rafferty realizes that the camera is shaking, too. Claus Ulrich is excited.

Toom waves the cigar away and hangs her head. The hand disappears and comes back without the cigar, and then it moves too fast for the camera to track and backhands Toom across the face. Toom's face snaps around, the short hair flying, and she is knocked sideways across Doughnut. Doughnut's eyes remain closed. When the hand reenters the frame, it has the cigar in it again.

Without opening her eyes, Doughnut says something to her sister.

This time, very slowly, Toom takes it. With the cigar pressed between the first and second fingers of her right hand, she does the best she can to make a very high wai to her sister, who has opened her eyes.

Doughnut smiles at her.

"Turn it off," Rafferty says. His voice is a rasp. He has looked away from the screen, but he doesn't even want the images in his peripheral vision.

"It goes on for quite a while," Doughnut says, snapping the set off. "Although at the time it seemed much longer."

Rafferty reaches reflexively for another cigarette, catches himself.

"So, two nights later, I broke a window and went out through it. Cut myself here." She swipes at the scar on her chin. "I had to do it, for Toom. She hadn't stopped crying since she hurt me. I thought she was going to cry herself to death. I couldn't help her while I was inside, so I got out. My first night out, I met Coke on the street."

"Coke?"

"The short one," she says, indicating the vanished men with her chin. "He was little, but he liked me, and he helped me. And he had something I needed."

"What?" Coke and Doughnut.

"A gun." She brings the black eyes up to his, as though to make sure he is listening. "I had to get Toom out, so I needed a gun. I didn't know they had cut her to get even with me for escaping. Cut her here." She raises a leg and draws a quick line across her Achilles tendon.

The flopping foot. "Who did?"

"The two Chinese men."

"I'm surprised you didn't go after them, too."

Doughnut stubs out her half-smoked cigarette on the tabletop, being very careful to fold it over neatly before she drops it on the floor. She looks down at it and twists her shoe on it, killing it dead.

"Well, sure," Rafferty says. Despite his mounting revulsion-at what he has seen, at what she has done-he can't help seeing her as Miaow grown up, a Miaow for whom things had gone differently, things over which she had no control. The plain brown face, the dark hair, the knife-edge part. He realizes she is talking.

"…finally, Lee, the one who liked to beat the girls, drove her out and took her to a number hotel, and I got off Coke's motorcycle and walked into the parking lot, just as Lee got out of the car. I shot him there, and we took Toom. When I saw her foot, I decided to kill Kwan, too." She lets her chin fall onto her chest, the first time she has betrayed anything like exhaustion. "And I did, about eight months later." She sounds as calm as someone describing what she had for dinner. "A week after my twelfth happy birthday. Then I went off with Toom and Coke, and we made a life."

As she describes it, it had not been a conventional household. Coke robbed people and sent Doughnut to school with the money he stole, while Toom kept house. Doughnut learned English and computer skills and thought about Claus.

"How did you find him?"

"I didn't. I just saw him on the street. Big as ever. Just walking along, like a real person. You want to hear something funny? I was terrified." She brings her right hand to her heart and taps, twice. "Terrified. He was exactly the same. He looked at me like I wasn't there, and I realized he didn't know who I was. I smiled at him." She fiddles with the package of cigarettes and then pushes it aside. "I think that was the hardest thing, that smile, that I ever did. He nodded and walked right past. So I turned around and followed him, and then I knew where he lived. Easy. I could hardly believe it."

"I think I know some of the rest of it," Rafferty says. He tells her what he has learned about Noot and Bangkok Domestics and Madame Wing. "So you got in, and there you were. In that apartment. Just you and Claus."

She nods. Then she reaches up and smooths her hair.

"How did you stand it?"

Her fingers find the cigarettes again, and she takes one out without looking at it. "No problem. It was almost fun. I was nice to him. I cooked and cleaned and took care of him like he was a big, fat, ugly, smelly baby. He stank of meat. He had hair on his back, like a monkey. He poured sweet stuff all over himself because he smelled so bad. I told him he was handsome. Why do men always believe they are handsome? I made him love me. He called me his little sugar doughnut." She spits the English words like hard seeds, as though she expects them to bounce on the table. "I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to think I loved him. Like Toom loved me, like somebody sometime must have loved all those girls he hurt. It was necessary for him to think I loved him."

"Because it wasn't enough just to kill him."

She places the unlit cigarette between her index fingers as though she is measuring it and looks at him over it. "Would you think it was enough?"

Rafferty does not answer, just regards the small, dark, harmless-looking girl sitting opposite him in her pastel clothes. Looks at the clean, cropped nails; the bright, childish plastic bracelet; the meticulously brushed hair. Looks at the child tied to the bed. Doughnut.

Who could have been Miaow.

She returns his gaze impassively and lets the cigarette fall to the table. "Well, it wasn't. First he had to trust me. Then he had to love me. Then he had to do something good, just once in his life."

"He already had," Rafferty says. "Clarissa. The niece."

She moves her head to one side, dodging the words. "For me. He had to do something for me, so he could feel good about himself. Feel good about being alive."

"Jesus," Rafferty says.

"So I borrowed money from him. I told him my family needed it, which was true. I gave him some time to feel what it was like to be good, to be proud of himself. I gave him a week, thanked him every day. Told him he had saved my mama's life by buying medicine for her. He was so proud of himself that he went on a diet. Then I fell in my bathroom. I screamed. He ran in to help me. Feeling like a hero. I'd thought about where to do it while I polished all that furniture. I needed him to be in the bathroom."

"For cleanup." He is watching her eyes, trying to see the person behind them. Only when she catches him and glances down does he see a crack in the surface, a vulnerability in the shell.

She does not look back up. "He lifted me off the floor and sat me on the edge of the tub, and I shot him in the leg. Then I shot him in the other leg."

"You were close to him."

"I wanted to be close. I would have liked to have been inside him, so I could know how much it hurt. After he fell down, I shot him again, very low in the stomach."

"Ouch," Rafferty says.

"I stood in the tub, waiting to make sure he couldn't move. His eyes were open, looking at me like I was something he'd never seen before. Something he'd never imagined. I suppose I was. A girl hurting him. I suppose it was something new."

Rafferty thinks for a moment about what he wants to say. "You can live a long time with a stomach wound."

"And I let him. I told him all about it. Everything he had done to me." For a moment she seems puzzled, and she looks back up at him with something like an appeal in her eyes. "He didn't remember me. He had me confused with another girl. I'd thought about him every day for years, and he didn't remember me. But when I talked about Toom, about us being sisters, then he remembered. You know what he said?"

Rafferty discovers that he doesn't really want to know. He lifts a palm.

"He said, 'Those were good pictures.' So I shot him in the head."

She slumps back in her seat. "I was tired," she says. "I didn't mean to let him go that fast."

Rafferty reaches across the table, picks up the cigarette she dropped, and lights it. Feels the good poison course through him, killing him a little but not quite enough. "Have you ever cried about all this?"

Her chin comes up and her lips thin, and for a second Rafferty thinks he is seeing the face Ulrich must have seen in his last minutes. "About what happened to you, what happened to Toom. Did you ever take the time to cry over it?"

"Toom cried," she says flatly. "One of us had to be the dry one. One of us had to do something about it."

"Then what do you feel? Now that it's over."

She stretches across, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and puts it between her lips. "I feel like I made a mistake."

It is not the answer he expects. "You do?"

"I should have waited. I should have let him lose some more weight on his diet. Take it from me. If you're going to shoot somebody and you have to get rid of the body, choose someone thin."

"I'll keep it in mind."

"But I couldn't wait. Do you want to know why?"

"I think I do," Rafferty says. "He had packed a bag. He was going somewhere, wasn't he? Somewhere where he could get hold of some kids."

"I'm impressed," she says, not sounding particularly impressed. She looks down at the cigarette. "I miss him, in a way," she says thoughtfully. "He gave me something to do."

"Can I have the cigarette back?"

She passes it over to him, shaking her head. "I didn't know I'd taken it."

"Anybody left?" he asks. She glances up at him, eyebrows raised. "Are you at the end of your list, Doughnut, or is somebody left?"

Another shake of the head, without much behind it. "Finished."

"What about the lady who brought you to Bangkok?"

"That was only business. If I kill everybody who does business, there won't be anybody left. No. They were different. They needed to die."

Rafferty sucks deeply on the cigarette, replaying the remark in his head. Then he hands the cigarette back to her. He gets up, feeling light-headed and profoundly doubtful about what he is going to do. "Okay."

She looks startled, something he didn't know she had left in her. "Okay?"

"Okay. That's it. I asked, you told me. The end."

She studies his face. "Do you mean that? No police?"

"The way I look at it," he says, "this wasn't murder. It was self-defense. It was just a little late." She sits there, immobile, and her eyes drop again, and some of the rigidity leaves her shoulders.

He goes to the door behind her and turns back, looking at that perfectly controlled hair. "Doughnut," he says, and she brings her head around and gazes up at him, looking younger and more open from this perspective. "You swear you're finished, yes?"

She nods. "Yes," she says. She touches her heart with her index finger. "Promise." Then she smiles at him. "If I weren't finished, you'd be carried out of here with the dead flowers."