A Nail Through the Heart

8

He awakes to the familiar gloom. The bedroom's only window is blocked by an asthmatic air conditioner that drowns out the noise of the Bangkok streets eight stories down, as though to compensate for its failure to cool the room. Four or five beams of light penetrate the ragged seal around the air con and pick out objects at random, like bad stage lighting: his shoes on the floor, a paperback of Conrad's The Secret Agent splayed open and facedown, the towel Rose folded at the foot of the bed when she came in from her inevitable bedtime shower, the shower every bar girl takes before slipping between the sheets to go to work. His efforts to convince her that he actually prefers her own taste to that of soap have not been successful. In her mind, the bar may be behind her, but the body retains its habits.

So: the towel, the book, the shoes. A harmonica Miaow briefly tortured them with, discarded now, that somehow crawled out of the closet under its own power. Pieces of the life he has made here. A life, he thinks, that could shatter into its component pieces as quickly and senselessly as the lives broken by the great waves.

Midway through his first stretch of the morning, he remembers the boy, and his stomach involuntarily contracts.

And then he puts out a hand and realizes that Rose is not beside him.

Wrapping himself in the ersatz-silk robe Miaow bought him for his birthday, an unsettling pink the color of healthy gums and adorned on the back with a fey dragon lisping fire, he pads into the empty living room and then the empty kitchen. Morning light slants into the room, throwing the remains of their dinner into unappetizing relief. No Rose: an early-morning start for the new businesswoman. Trying unsuccessfully to smooth his hair, he goes down the hall to Miaow's room.

The children are seated on the pink rug he bought Miaow when she moved in. The boy averts his face the instant Rafferty looks in. Miaow is rebraiding his hair with such intensity of purpose that she does not even turn at the sound of the opening door. Eight or ten brightly colored rubber bands circle her wrists, and several others are already wrapped around the ends of the boy's new braids, a style that owes something to Snoop Dogg and Thai MTV. Rafferty thinks briefly about Having Their Talk and then looks at his watch: almost ten. He has promised to call Clarissa Ulrich. But before he can do much of anything, he needs coffee.

He has caffeinated, showered, dressed, and set his appointment with Clarissa when the door opens and Rose comes in. As always, when he first sees her each day, he feels the same jolt of electricity that straightened his spine when she stepped onto the stage at the King's Castle bar the evening they met. Then she had worn a black bikini and a badge with her number on it, the number customers used to buy her drinks or order her for the night. Today she wears jeans and a carefully ironed T-shirt. Plastic shopping bags hang from her arms where the gold bracelets-now long sold-used to be. One bag is full to overflowing with shoes.

He toasts her with his third cup of coffee. "If those are for me, I generally wear higher heels."

"So do I." She drops the bag where she stands. It must be a scorcher outside, because her upper lip is damp, Rose's reaction to weather that would melt most people where they stood. "I've got two maid interviews today. My girls have promised to do their job, which is to dress down and not plaster on the makeup. My job is not to tower over the women who want housekeepers."

Rose has been trying to build her business for several months now, and she has learned the hard way that most women, especially married women, aren't eager to hire someone who looks like she earned an advanced degree at Pussy Galore. Some of her corps of former flowers are still beautiful, while others are well past the point at which they would be assigned to dance at the front of the bar, visible from the street. By and large they are not convincing housemaids. Something of that other world clings to them, some kind of glimmer that can't be washed off like makeup or hidden beneath baggy clothes. More than anything else, it's a physical attitude. People who have danced naked in front of hundreds of strangers present themselves differently.

"You shopped yesterday," he says, looking at the bags.

"Seems like a week ago." Rose blows upward at her damp bangs. "These are the things I'm going to need for the next few days."

"You're going to stay here?" A basic plank of Rose's declaration of independence is her reluctance to spend more than one night at a time in Rafferty's apartment. Most nights she sleeps in a sweltering ten-foot-by-ten-foot concrete box near Convent Road, splitting the rent with two women who once danced with her at the King's Castle.

"You have to go running around for Arthit, storing up favors," she says. "We've got a guest. I thought you could use the help." She bends down and rummages through the bags while Rafferty tries to think of some way to express his gratitude that won't embarrass her. "This blond woman," Rose says, both hands in one of the bags. "Is she pretty?"

"Not particularly."

"Would she, as you say, turn heads?"

"Only on very loose necks."

She straightens up with a brush in her hand. "Then do something about your hair," she says. "No point in frightening the poor thing."

"We talked once a week for fifteen years," Clarissa Ulrich says without moving her lower jaw. Her lips work fine, but her teeth might as well be wired together. Tension creates vertical bands down the sides of her neck. "It's been more than two months since I heard from him."

If Rose had seen this woman, Rafferty thinks, she would have combed his hair herself. Clarissa Ulrich is no threat. A long peninsula of sweat extends down the front of her blouse, and her pale, flyaway hair catches the rosy light from the window of the coffee shop, creating the pinkish aura of an igniting match. She is clearly not enjoying Bangkok's climate. She has the look he has come to recognize on farang who are new to Bangkok, a steely conviction that life will go on if they can only survive the next five minutes. And Hofstedler is right: She reeks of angst, both metaphorically and physically. He smells sweat, cigarettes, and fear.

"Have there been lapses before?" He blows on his coffee, keeping his eyes on his notebook. She is uncomfortable being looked at.

She folds her hands in her lap like a child being reprimanded. Her plumpness is watery and unhealthy-looking, as if a finger pressed into her cheek would leave a dimple. The front of her blouse sags beneath a wilted silk flower that strikes him as the most metaphorical fashion statement he has ever seen.

"We've never missed a talk." She lifts her cup. Her nails are bitten to the quick, the cuticles ragged as torn paper. "We're much closer than most uncles and nieces." She sips the coffee and winces at the burn. "My parents," she says, as though he has asked a question. "They're both surgeons. They never had much time for…um, anything but their work. Everything was life and death except, you know, actual life. Everything was a distraction."

"Everything." He writes "surgeons," mostly to keep his gaze off her.

"Well, I was certainly a distraction." She wraps her damaged fingers around the cup, although he knows it must be burning her. "I was a…a piece of furniture they hadn't ordered, something they stumbled over in the dark. My mother told me as much. 'You know, dear,' she said, 'you weren't planned. You were Mommy's little surprise.'" She registers the heat in her hands, puts the cup down, and blows into her palms. "So Uncle Claus stepped in."

Rafferty suddenly recognizes the bitterness in her eyes. He has seen it in Miaow's. "He took care of you."

"He took me in. It started with visits when my parents were on vacation, and the visits got longer until finally I was living at his house. Nobody ever said much of anything, but when I went home one day, my mother had rearranged my room. I always slept under the window, because light came through it and I was afraid of the dark. My mother had pushed the bed against the wall. 'It looks much bigger this way,' she said. I was fourteen, and I said, 'It looks bigger because I'm not in it.'" A strangled laugh, rocks rattling in a can. "So I went back home. To Uncle Claus."

"Okay, so you're living with Uncle Claus. What took him to Bangkok?"

"He worked in oil in Saudi Arabia when he was young. He'd work there a few months and then spend a month here, decompressing, he said. He loved it here. When I went to college, he came to stay."

Rafferty hesitates for a moment, but he has to ask the question. "People usually stay in Bangkok for a reason. What was your uncle's reason?"

"I just told you. He loves it."

Not very specific, he thinks. "And what did he do here?"

"What does he do here, you mean." Her eyes roam the room, taking in the clientele, mostly affluent young Thais wearing designer clothes, some of them in the head-to-toe black of the world's terminally hip, although until recently Thais associated black primarily with funerals. "He helps out. He works with groups that do volunteer work with the homeless, especially kids. That's why that nice policeman thought you'd want to help, because of your little girl."

Thanks, Arthit. "Groups that work with kids," he writes. "Okay, so before he stopped calling. Did anything seem different? Did he talk about anything new?"

She studies the tabletop for a moment, then wipes her side of it with a napkin. "There was a maid. He hired her not too long ago. His calls were full of her. Doughnut was her name. Doughnut this, Doughnut that. He was crazy about her."

"There can't be that many girls named Doughnut." He doesn't even bother to write it down.

"I sort of hope not," Clarissa says. "But it's funny, because she hasn't answered the phone in his apartment since his calls stopped. She always answered before."

Doughnut, Rafferty thinks. "Two months ago the waves hit. Do you think there's any chance he went down to the coast?"

"That's what everybody asks. No. Uncle Claus is enormous. Not the bathing-suit type. And he burns in five minutes. I can't imagine why he'd go down there."

Rafferty can think of several possible reasons, all of them in the raunchier areas of Patong Beach on Phuket. "I'll check anyway. Have you been to his apartment?"

"I don't have a key."

She has turned to stare out the window and into the glare of the day, as though she hopes she will see her uncle stroll by.

"Somehow," Rafferty says, "I don't think that will be a problem."