The Fourth Watcher: A Novel of Bangkok

24
Major-League Heat

I killed him, Poke thinks. I didn't mention the triad, and I killed him. With Prettyman's death reverberating in his mind, the day he originally planned, a day he meant to spend dealing with the counterfeiting situation, suddenly seems irrelevant. The threat seems almost quaint. The new day's first light is tinting the sky as he uses the key Arthit gave him to open the front door of the house. He locks it behind him and trudges into the living room, weighing several thousand pounds.

Rose is asleep on the couch. A yellow cotton blanket covers her to the shoulders. Her knees are drawn up-the couch is too short for her-and one arm is outthrown, the hand dangling at the wrist, palm up. There is something terribly vulnerable in that loose hand, with its pale palm and curled fingers.

Rose is not a light sleeper, and she doesn't stir as he approaches her.

He kneels to examine the face he has come to love: the mouth, its upper lip high in the middle and the lower full and generous. The delicate seashell whorl of her nostrils, perhaps the most beautiful curve he has ever seen. The smooth swelling of her cheekbones. He studies her face, every detail, for at least five minutes.

She and Miaow are his life now. Nothing that concerns them is irrelevant.

Then he turns around and goes out into the paling day to hail a tuk-tuk.

Just to be on the safe side, he takes the tuk-tuk for a few blocks and gets out, waiting to see whether anyone seems to be paying attention to him. At this hour, though, there is virtually no one on the streets. He hails a cab, makes the driver circle his building three times as he looks for watchers, and then has the man drop him in the basement garage.

To avoid the noise of the elevator in case someone is waiting on his floor, he takes the stairs. He gets all the way to the fifth floor, each step a yard high, before he remembers that the doors are locked on each floor. Muttering unflattering self-appraisal, he goes back down to the lobby, crosses his fingers, and pushes the "up" button.

Not much he can do when the elevator doors open except stand as far as possible to one side with the gun out. The hallway is empty.

It takes him a couple of minutes to work the pick out of the lock and insert his own key. When he pulls the key back, it slips out as though it has been greased. He thinks briefly of kicking the door into small pieces but decides that the satisfaction isn't worth the noise and enters the apartment with his gun in both hands.

He needn't have bothered. The place is deserted.

It takes only a few minutes to get what he needs, a change of clothes for all of them and-as an afterthought-Miaow's new cell phone, which she had left on top of her desk, surrounded by a circlet of browning ginger flowers like a small metallic shrine. The bag of counterfeit money, much to his relief, is still in its hiding place on the top shelf of the closet. The men last night had been looking for people, not loot. From the safe concealed in the headboard above his bed, he removes his third ammunition clip and the rest of his own reserve of money. He will need every baht of it. On the way out, he makes one more stop in the kitchen to get a jar of Nescafe for Rose, who lives on it, since he's not sure Noi will have any in her kitchen. He throws it all into a canvas tote bag, takes a last, regretful look around, and heads for the stairs.

As he reaches the seventh floor, his cell phone rings. "Where the hell are you?" Arthit demands. "How nice to hear your voice." "Why aren't you at my house? You're not supposed to be out wandering around." He can hear Noi's voice in the background, questioning and concerned. "Tell me you haven't gone someplace really stupid," Arthit says. "Your apartment, for example." "Okay, I won't tell you I went to my apartment." "There are moments, long moments, when I doubt your sanity. You're contaminated now. There's no way you can come back here until I can arrange something so complicated it would take a small army to track it." "I've got things to do. I won't come back without calling you." "You certainly won't." "Are we still on to creep Elson?" "We are. I need some sleep first." "So why aren't you getting it?" "The chopper choppers," Arthit says. "The boys downstairs from the apartment we visited a few hours ago." "Yes, Arthit? Are you going to make me ask you about them?" "Aren't we touchy this morning? Four guys, they said. Three of them you've already met, by the descriptions. The fourth was a very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies. Military-looking, they said." "Anything more? A tonsure, a third eye, or anything? Something that would distinguish him from any other very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies?" "One of those moles the Chinese seem to admire. About the size of a ten-baht coin-or, to translate it into American for you, a quarter- with hairs growing out of it. Three or four inches long." "How'd they know he was Chinese? As opposed, say, to Korean." "One of the boys has a Chinese mother. He heard the thin man swear at one of the others in what is apparently a timelessly popular Chinese oath." "They hear any names?" "If they had heard any names," Arthit says, more than a bit briskly, "do you think that information would be so far down on this list?" "Sorry. Guess we're both a little cranky." "Well," Arthit says, "when you want some sleep, call me and I'll arrange some way for you to get to my place." He yawns. "I'll phone you later. And, Poke?"

"Yeah?"

"Try to keep today's to-do list of stupid things really short. You might limit it to the one you've already done."

"My phone's breaking up," Rafferty says. He punches it off and slips it into his pocket. Then, for the second time in less than six hours, he walks away from the place he has grown to think of as home.

In the Silom branch of Coffee World, he fools around on Google for thirty minutes or so as he drinks a quart of black coffee with half a dozen shots of espresso thrown in to raise the octane level. The words "Chinese triads" bring up 1,180,000 hits. He narrows it to "Chinese triads Shanghai," and the number is still something on the magnitude of science's best guess about the age of the earth, so he gives it up and concentrates on the act of jangling his central nervous system into some persuasive imitation of consciousness.

When he realizes he has reached the point of diminishing returns, he takes out the phone and punches in the number he had thought he would never dial.

"Poke." It is Ming Li, sounding cool and unsurprised as always.

"Is he there?"

"He's asleep."

"Wake him up."

"You're on your cell," she says. "Nothing worth waking him up for should be said on a cell. What time is it?"

"Eight-twenty. And it's important to you and important to me."

"Tell me where you are."

Why not? It's a little late to worry about any threat from Frank. He tells her.

"Twenty minutes," Ming Li says. Then she hangs up.

It's too early for his first planned stop of the day. The man he is going to see, whom he interviewed when he was in the first stages of researching his abandoned book, works seven days a week, but he won't be open for business until eleven or so. Since Rafferty's in front of a keyboard, he decides he'll take the most optimistic outlook: Everything will work out, and he still has to earn a living. He pulls his notebook from his pocket, opens Word, and begins to key in his notes about the spies.

He's surprised at how easily it comes. He transcribes a few words from the notebook, and then new impressions and new observations crowd in on him, and he weaves them into his notes. What had been the outline of a story begins to become the story itself, complete with the details that bring a place, a person, to life. Tired as he is, the words slip out with little resistance, and gradually the picture assembles itself, sentence by sentence, before his eyes. The trails these men took to come here, the peculiar mixture of openness and secrecy that characterizes their conversations, the eyes, different colors and different shapes, but always in motion.

Arnold Prettyman's eyes, open and unseeing.

His burned hands wired to the chair.

"Not very vigilant," Ming Li says, and he jumps two inches straight up from his seat. Ming Li steps back and says, "My, my. Maybe you shouldn't have any more coffee, older brother."

"I haven't slept in forty-eight hours," Rafferty says. "If it weren't for coffee, I'd be speaking to you from the floor."

She pulls up the stool next to him. She is immaculate in a free-hanging white T-shirt and loose-fitting black slacks. Every man in the coffeehouse stares at her. "What's that?" she says, leaning forward to read the screen.

"It's money," he says. He highlights the text, hits "copy," drops it into an e-mail to himself, and sends it off. Then he gets up and says, "Let's go."

"I want some coffee."

He looks through the window at the developing day. "Get it to go."

In the next twenty minutes, Ming Li leads him through a tangle of turnarounds, drop-backs, blind alleys, stop-and-watch points, and random reversals that would disorient a homing pigeon. Even Rafferty doesn't know where they are, and he says so.

"Six weeks with city maps before we came," Ming Li says. "I must have spent a hundred hours on Google Earth." She turns into a clothing store and positions herself at the window, behind the mannequins. "Frank's drill," she says, watching the street. She finishes the coffee, slurping it a bit.

"Frank's drill," he repeats, looking over her shoulder. Nothing catches his eye. "Did Frank's drill include teaching you to throw major- league heat?"

Her eyes continue to search the sidewalks. "Major what?"

"Pitching. Like you did with the lychee seeds."

"Ahh," Ming Li says. "Day in and day out." Without a glance back at him, she leaves the shop. Rafferty follows like a good little puppy.

"Why?"

"Why what? " They are side by side in the morning sun, and Ming Li leads them across the street. To most people it would look like a simple maneuver to get into the shade, but Rafferty knows that it pulls followers out of position, if there aren't many of them.

"Why did he teach you to pitch?"

She looks at him and then past him. Satisfied that no one is there who shouldn't be, she says, "He wanted me to be good at it."

Rafferty experiences a pang of something so much like jealousy that it would be silly to call it anything else. "He never taught me squat."

"Poor baby," Ming Li says without a hint of sympathy.

"Unless you count sitting silently around the house. He taught me all there is to know about that. My father the end table."

"Maybe when you were a kid, he wasn't homesick," she says.

Rafferty burps some of his newly acquired coffee. "He may not have been homesick, but he read every fucking word about China he could get his hands on."

"China wasn't home, older brother. China was my mother. She's pretty much a nightmare in some ways, but he loves her. He loves yours, too. But he couldn't bring her with him, could he? Had to leave her back there, with the rest of America. But baseball, baseball we could get. He picked it up on the shortwave at first, and then on satellite TV. Everything in our lives stopped for the World Series. Soon as I was big enough to get my fingers on the seams of the ball, he started to teach me. Hung an old tire in the courtyard of the house we shared with nine other families and had me throw through it, and I mean for hours. Every couple of weeks, I'd move a step back. I'm good to about fifty feet, but I haven't got the lift for longer."

"Huh," Rafferty says from the middle of a cloud of feelings. They swarm around him like mosquitoes, except he can't swat them away.

"When I was pitching, I was America," she says. "And I was you."

The words distract him so much he stumbles off the curb. "How did you feel about that?"

"I liked it. It made me feel important. It was getting the ball through the tire that was hard."

Rafferty realizes he can see it all: the dusty courtyard, the perspiring girl, the inner tube in the tree. And, behind her, his father. Her father. A life he never imagined. "Where is Frank?"

"He's where we're going. He did talk about you, you know. He was-he z's-proud of you." The two of them turn into a small street that Rafferty, after a moment, recognizes as Soi Convent, now known more for its restaurants and coffeehouses than for the religious retreat responsible for its name. "He's got all your books."

Rafferty says, "I don't want to talk about this."

"Too bad. And he's kept up with you in Bangkok."

This strikes a nerve. "Just exactly how?"

"Frank knows everybody." She steps off the curb into the morning traffic and raises a hand. "Too many people, in fact. That's part of the problem." A tuk-tuk swerves to the curb, its driver gaping at Ming Li as though he's never seen a woman before, and Rafferty thinks she must get a lot of that. "Mah Boon Krong," she says, naming a neighborhood Rafferty rarely frequents. She slides over on the seat. "Get in."

He does, and she gathers her loose black trousers around her.

"What about Leung?" Rafferty asks.

"One thing I've learned," she says, "is never to worry about Leung."

The driver lurches into traffic, both eyes on Ming Li in the rearview mirror.

"And does Leung worry about you?" He catches the driver's eyes in the mirror and says, in Thai, "Look at the road."

"More than he needs to. Frank's a good teacher."

The courtyard, the dust, the girl, the woman upstairs. All real, moment to moment, day after day, as real as his life in Lancaster. He forces his mind to the present. "It's not all baseball, huh?"

"Baseball and other games. Frank thinks four, five moves out."

"So where is he?"

"I'm not sure thinking ahead like that is something you can learn," Ming Li says, ignoring the question. "You have to keep all the pieces in your head all the time, be able to see the whole board in six or eight possible configurations. Either you have it or you don't. Do you play chess?"

Rafferty's turn to ignore the question. "I suppose he taught you."

"You know," she says with a hint of impatience, "all this started long before you were born, before Frank went home and met your mother. He had a life in China, he wasn't just a tourist. If anything was an afterthought, it was you."

"That's not exactly the point, is it? You don't start a family when you've already got one. In America it's called bigamy."

"In China it's called common sense. He had no way of knowing he'd ever be back. The Communists took the whole country, older brother. A lot of lives were changed. It looked permanent, and not just to Frank. What was he supposed to do, go into a monastery? Although," she adds, "I've always thought Frank would make a good monk. He's got the discipline and the patience for it. And the focus."

"A Jesuit, maybe."

"Exactly, although I'm sure you don't mean it the same way I do."

"What's he running away from?"

"You'd know already if you hadn't ridden your stupid horse out of that restaurant."

"Whatever it was," Rafferty says, "it followed him."

"No it didn't," she says with considerable force. "Nothing follows Frank unless he lets it." She turns and pokes him square in the chest. "You brought it here."