The Fourth Watcher

40

"He’s getting the rubies,” Frank says on Rafferty’s cell phone. “The papers.”

“He’s not going to settle for the rubies and the papers.” Rafferty is on his way home from Elson’s hotel, in the backseat of a cab. He chose a cab instead of a tuk-tuk in deference to the rain, which has achieved epic scale. In four blocks they have passed half a dozen stalled cars and two accidents. The sidewalk neons are shapeless smears of diluted color, echoed on the wet pavement.

“What about the money?” Ming Li’s voice comes from the bottom of a cave, and Rafferty has to press the phone harder against his ear to hear her. Frank has his cell phone on speaker.

“The money’s an extra. He’s not expecting it, so that could help. But let’s face it, what he wants is Frank.”

Ming Li says, “We’ve talked about this before. The answer is still no.”

Frank says, “Ming Li. Don’t talk, listen.” Then he says to Rafferty, “Where?”

“I’ll let you know in an hour or two.”

“You can’t give him Frank,” Ming Li says.

“Maybe you can think of something else.” A car speeds by in the opposite direction, throwing up a five-foot wave that shatters against the windows of Rafferty’s cab. His driver says the Thai equivalent of “fuckhead” and hits the horn in retaliation.

“At the very least, we need to know where it’s going to happen,” Ming Li says.

“You’re not going to know, until the last minute, and neither will I. I’m letting Chu pick the place.”

“Are you crazy? If he picks the place, we can’t set anything up.”

“That’s exactly right. He’s not stupid. One sniff of anything screwy and he’s gone. He’ll kill everyone and disappear. And he’ll still be after you. He’ll be after you until either he or Frank is dead. We have to end it here, and that means he thinks he’s in control and that he’s going to get everything he wants.”

“Poke’s right,” Frank says. “I know Chu. He’s not going to walk into anything that could be a setup.”

“So we’re going to let him set us up?” Ming Li says.

“He won’t get a chance,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to give him fifteen, twenty minutes between the time he sets the place and the time we walk into it. And I’m ninety percent sure I know where it’ll be.”

“How?” Ming Li asks.

“I’m going to force it,” Rafferty says. “Send Leung with the box. I’ll talk to you in an hour.”

He closes the cell phone, looks out the window, and resigns himself to the fact that he’s not going to be able to see where he is until he’s home. He digs a business card out of his shirt pocket and dials the number on it.

“Kosit,” says the leather-faced cop.

“This is Rafferty. How’s Arthit?”

“No word yet. The doctors are still in there.”

“I need to see you.”

“Um,” Kosit says, “I’m not sure I should leave here.”

“This is for Arthit. Believe me, he’d want you to do it.”

“What do you mean, it’s for Arthit?”

“It’s between you and me. Are you okay with that?”

“I might be. What is it?”

“Fine. You be the judge.” He tells Kosit about Noi, about Rose and Miaow, and about the meeting with Chu.

“Worse and worse.” Kosit sounds as drained as Rafferty feels. “What do you want me to do?”

“I’ll tell you at my place.”

Kosit says, “Somebody’s got to be coming out of Arthit’s room soon. Give me half an hour. If we don’t hear anything by then, I’ll leave. And listen, for Arthit I can get you a hundred cops, if you need them.”

“Thanks,” Rafferty says. “But I think Arthit would say we don’t need them.”

Only one jar of Nescafe this time. The color should vary. Rafferty stirs it in, examines the tint of the water in the washer’s tub, and rummages through the cabinets until he finds a tin of powdered green tea. He can hear the hair dryers whirring in the other room, broken occasionally by the sound of women laughing. Fon comes into the kitchen, lugging two very heavy-looking plastic bags from Foodland, conveniently open twenty-four hours.

“They’ve only got two left,” she says. “We’ve practically bought them out.” She grunts as she lifts the bags to the counter. “I got your glue, too.”

Rafferty adds half the green tea to the water and stirs with his hand. “What do you think?”

“I’m no expert,” Fon says. “When I see money, all I look at is the numbers.”

“Looks okay to me.” He reaches over and untwists the cap on one of the big jugs of fabric softener from Fon’s shopping bags and empties the entire bottle into the tub. “Let’s just use one this time,” he says. “Last batch got a little mushy.”

“Fine,” Fon says, looking down at the water. “Maybe there’ll be a bottle I can take home.”

“I’ll trade it for the basket.”

“Pretty expensive fabric softener,” she says. She bends down and comes up with a large plastic laundry basket, which she gives to Rafferty. He upends it into the washer. Crisp, flat money flutters down onto the surface of the water, and Rafferty pushes it under and adds more, repeating the process until it’s all in the tub. Fon takes the empty basket.

“I think we’ll use the delicate cycle,” he says, hearing the absurdity in the words. “It’s faster.” He is up to his elbows in water and money, so he says, “What time is it?”

“A little after two.”

“We need more people,” Rafferty says. He pushes “start” on the washing machine, dries his hands, and follows Fon into the living room.

Lek and three other women, all from Rose and Peachy’s agency, sit on the floor around another laundry tub. The tub is blue plastic with square holes in the sides. Two of the women reach in and toss the money like a salad while the others aim hair dryers through the holes. The floor is a snake farm of extension cords. When Rafferty went into the kitchen to start the new load, the basket looked only half full. Now, with the bills drier and not clinging to each other, they almost reach the top edge. As the dry bills are blown to the top, one of the women gathers them and carries them to the couch, which is covered from one end to the other in loose, dried money, nearly a foot thick. Rafferty goes to it, picks up a double handful, crumples them, then lets them drop.

They look and feel a lot better. Not ready yet, but better.

“We’re never going to finish at this rate,” he says. “Who else can we call?”

As if in answer, someone knocks on the door. Rafferty waves the women into the kitchen, realizes there is nothing he can do about the money everywhere, and pulls the Glock. He opens the door an inch and sees Lieutenant Kosit. “Oh.” He sticks the gun into his pants, behind his back. “It’s you.”

Kosit’s eyes are red-rimmed, his face tight enough to have been freeze-dried. He peers past Rafferty and pulls his head back a fraction of an inch in surprise. “What are you doing?”

“Laundering money,” Rafferty says. “To buy Noi back.” He pulls the door open, but Kosit stands rooted where he is, and Rafferty’s heart sinks. “News?”

“He’s in intensive care,” Kosit says. “The bullet hit the lung, but it also nicked a ventricle. If that tech hadn’t been on top of Arthit’s blood pressure, he would have bled to death internally.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t know shit. They’re talking about shock, infection, a whole list of stuff that could kill him. But I’ll get a call if anything changes.”

“Come on in.”

Across the hallway the elevator doors open, and Mrs. Pongsiri steps off, wearing a short black cocktail dress and carrying the world’s smallest handbag, on the surface of which five or six sequins jostle for space. Her eyes go to Rafferty and then travel to Kosit’s uniform, and she begins to smile. Then she sees the money spread over the couch, and the smile hardens into a mask. She says, “Oh, my.”

From behind Rafferty someone squeals “Anh!” and he turns to see Fon grinning at Mrs. Pongsiri like a long-lost sister.

“Fon,” Mrs. Pongsiri says in a voice Rafferty has never heard before: higher, softer, younger, the voice of the bars and clubs. She opens her arms like a soprano reaching for the top note. Fon shoves her way between Rafferty and Kosit, and the two women embrace. Mrs. Pongsiri kisses Fon on the cheek and squeezes her so hard that Fon lets out a little squeak. Holding Fon at arm’s length, Mrs. Pongsiri looks back to the couch full of money and says, “But what in the world-”

Now the other women reappear. Lek and one other, whose name Rafferty doesn’t know, give Mrs. Pongsiri wide, white smiles as they pick up their hair dryers and get back to work.

“You’re. . drying money?” Mrs. Pongsiri asks, the question wrinkling her forehead.

“We need to make it look old,” Rafferty says. “So we washed it.”

Mrs. Pongsiri blinks heavily, obviously sorting through, and rejecting, half a dozen questions. Finally she settles on the practical. “Don’t you have a dryer?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says, “but I think it’ll make them too stiff.”

Mrs. Pongsiri wearily shakes her head. “Softener sheets,” she says, as though speaking to a disappointing child. “Just throw them in with the money.”

Kosit and Rafferty look at each other.

“I bought a box of them today,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “I’ll be right back.” She gets a new grip on her purse and bustles down the hall. As she unlocks her door, Rafferty hears her say, “Men.”

Kosit gives a disbelieving glance at the shirt cardboards Rafferty has glued together, looks at the suitcase and the bent coat hangers Rafferty plans to use for support, and says, “Never.”

Through the open door to the living room, Rafferty hears the women talking. He feels like his battery died and corroded days ago, but the women are fully charged. For most of them, this is the first time they’ve worked their normal hours in months.

“Why not?” He and Kosit are sitting on the bed.

Kosit picks up the shirt boards. Rafferty’s newly laundered shirts, stripped from the cardboard, litter the floor. “Too flexible,” Kosit says, bending them. “Even glued together. You need it to be rigid. This stuff is heavy. And the lever won’t work. Not enough pressure.”

“Start with the boards. What can we do?”

“Can’t add much weight,” Kosit says, thinking. “What about those books in the living room?”

“Books are heavy,” Rafferty says.

“The covers aren’t. Get a bunch of hardbacks and some sort of cutter. Look.” He frames a book cover in his hands and mimes placing them across the platform of shirt boards. “Overlap them,” he says. “Crisscrossed. Glued on both sides, so they don’t bend.”

“That leaves the lever,” Rafferty says.

“It leaves a lot of things,” Kosit says. “The hinges on the suitcase, for example. You need to oil them so they’re almost friction-free.” He opens and closes the suitcase several times. “Too much resistance,” he says.

“I’ve got oil. What about the lever?”

“I can fix the lever. But you need more. .” Kosit searches for the word, then brings his hands slowly together and pulls them apart quickly.

Rafferty says, “Shit. Well, it’s not the end of the world. I don’t think I’ll need this. It’s just insurance.”

Kosit sits back, looking doubtfully at the suitcase, at the mess they have made. Then his face clears, and he points at the mattress. His eyebrows come up in a question.

“Sure,” Rafferty says. “If the next four or five hours go wrong, I’ll never sleep on it again anyway.”

He gets up and goes into the living room to get the books and an X-acto knife. The production line is in full swing. The dryer, with the last load in it, is running in the kitchen. Two women crumple or fold the bills and smooth them again. Another chooses one bill out of four or five and makes a small mark with a felt-tip, either black or red, like those used by banks. Fon has taken to writing random phone numbers with a ballpoint pen on every tenth or twelfth bill. She passes the bills on to Mrs. Pongsiri, who sorts the baht and the dollars into two stacks and smooths them again.

Suddenly Mrs. Pongsiri breaks into a laugh and then reaches over and swats Fon lightly on top of the head. The other girls gather round to look at the bill, and then they all laugh. Rafferty reaches for it and turns it over. It is an American hundred. In the slender margin at the edge, Fon has carefully written, “Love you long time.”

Getting into the spirit, Mrs. Pongsiri says, “Roll up some of the American hundreds. Roll them very tightly and then unroll them again.”

Kosit, framed in the doorway to the bedroom, eyes her narrowly for a moment and then says, “Good idea.”

“Americans in my club,” Mrs. Pongsiri says, hurrying the words. She has apparently just remembered that Kosit is a cop. “They do that all the time, and then they inhale something through it.”

“Probably vitamin C,” Kosit says. “I’m sure there are no drugs at your club.”

“Very high-end,” Mrs. Pongsiri agrees.

“What’s the name of your club?” Kosit asks.

“It’s called Rempflxnblt,” says Mrs. Pongsiri, sneezing most of the word into her palm. She presses an index finger beneath her nostrils. “Sorry. It’s the perfume in the fabric softener.”

“Mrs. Pongsiri my mama-san once,” Fon says cheerfully in English. Mrs. Pongsiri blanches. “Same-same with Lek and Jah. Very good mama-san. Never hit girls, never take money.”

“Almost never,” Lek says, and the other women laugh again.

Lek is wrapping rubber bands around the stacks: ten thousand dollars per stack in American hundreds, one hundred bills in each stack of thousand-baht notes. She ran out of rubber bands ten minutes ago, and the women removed a remarkable variety of elastic loops from their hair. Mrs. Pongsiri traipsed down the hall a second time and came back with a box containing enough scrunchies to style a yeti. Rafferty is a little worried about the predominance of beauty products, but he figures if the stacks are mixed up enough, they won’t be so conspicuous.

With a thwack, Lek snaps a bright pink scrunchie around a wad of thousand-baht notes, and Rafferty’s cell phone shrills. Every eye in the room goes to him as he opens the phone and puts it to his ear.

“Coming up,” Leung says. “With a surprise.”

“What I don’t need right now is a surprise.”

“This is a surprise you’d rather have now than later. You might want to meet me in the hall.” He hangs up.

“How much more?” Rafferty asks the women.

“Halfway done,” Fon says. “We kept some to speed things up.” The other women laugh, some more heartily than others.

“If you do,” Rafferty says, “take the stuff on the coffee table. It may not be as pretty, but it’s real.” He pulls a dozen hardcover books of approximately the same size off the shelf and heads for the bedroom. He has just dropped them in front of Kosit, who is sitting on the bed, which has a long rip in it where the policeman worked out a spring, when the doorbell rings.

“Listen,” Kosit says. “The bedsprings aren’t enough.”

“Well, Jesus,” Rafferty says. He can barely focus on the problem. “Use anything.”

Kosit shakes his head. “I don’t know-”

“Use those,” Rafferty says, pointing to the stun grenades hanging from Kosit’s belt. “That ought to open things up.”

Kosit tilts one up and lets it drop back. “I’m not sure. The pins are hard to pop. They take a good hard tug. I don’t know if the lever-”

The doorbell rings again. “Please,” Rafferty says. “Solve it.” He goes back into the living room and opens the door, just enough to squeeze out into the hallway.

Leung stands there, water dripping off the end of his nose, a canvas bag hanging from his shoulder. The gun in his hand is pointed at the fat cop and the thin cop. Pradya and Sriyat, Rafferty thinks. The fat cop, Pradya, tries on a smile.

Rafferty looks at the three of them, and an overwhelming weariness seizes hold of him. He leans against the wall and closes his eyes for a moment, trying to find a way to make this new development work to his advantage. When he opens his eyes again, Pradya has given up on his smile. “You,” Rafferty says to Sriyat. “Go back to Chu. Take your time, but go back. Tell him whatever you want. Tell him Leung caught you, I don’t care. Tell him we kept Pradya.” Sriyat doesn’t even nod, just turns to ring for the elevator. “Do you still know which side you’re on?” Rafferty asks.

Sriyat turns his head a quarter of the way, his mouth a taut line. “Not much choice,” he says.

“Make sure you remember that,” Rafferty says. To Pradya and Leung, he says, “Come on in. I’ll try to find you someplace to sit.”