The Queen of Patpong

Chapter 21

Rafferty says, "Pack. Everything you'll need for three or four days." He's tugging at the hem of a new T-shirt, water dripping onto it from the tip of his chin, which he missed with the towel after splashing his face. His hair is damp from his having clawed through it with wet fingers.

Rose says, "Where are we going?"

"Later. For now, pack." To Pim he says, "This isn't the safest place in Bangkok. You should probably go."

Pim looks at Rose and then Miaow. "Can I help?"

Rose says, "I'll pack for me and tell you what to pack for Poke."

"Don't forget the Glock," Rafferty says, and Miaow swivels to stare at him. "Both clips."

"Where are you going?"

"Arthit's not in his office, and no one is answering at home. So I'm going to his house."

Miaow says, "With no one answering? Maybe he doesn't want to see anybody."

"Of course he doesn't want to see anybody. I should have gone over days ago." HE HAS to knock three times.

Standing there with the morning sun beating down on his shoulders, he has more time than he needs to see things he doesn't want to see: The tiny dead lawn, the stunted line of brown scrub where the flowers used to be. Three yellowing copies of the Bangkok Sun, lying any which way on the fried, brittle grass. When Arthit's wife, Noi, was alive, this little yard was as green and as immaculately tended as a Scottish golf course. Even after she got too sick to care for it herself, she would sit on the porch and direct Arthit as he planted and trimmed and raked and swept, grumbling happily the whole time.

It's been only eight months.

He's knocking again, harder this time, when the door opens. Arthit stands dead center in the doorway, blocking access. The house is dim behind him, the curtains apparently drawn. He does not smile at Rafferty. He glances at the graying bandage on Rafferty's elbow and the one on his thumb and says, "What?"

"You're not at the office."

"Thank you," Arthit says. "I was wondering where I wasn't." He hasn't shaved or combed his hair, and he's wearing a dirty T-shirt and a pair of wrinkled shorts. The circles beneath his eyes have an actual depth; they look like they've been pressed there with the bottom of a glass. The smell from the house is as sour and musty as a bad secret.

"Well, I mean, you've been working time and a half since-"

"And today I'm not." He looks past Rafferty as though making sure that no one else is coming. "You got my message."

Rafferty smells alcohol on his friend's breath. It's 10:30 A.M. "Are you anything at all like okay?"

Arthit continues to look past Rafferty. "Did you come here to talk about me?"

"Not really."

"Good. Then let me start over. You got my message."

"Yes."

"That's why I left it," Arthit says. "Anything else?"

"What is it, Arthit?" Rafferty says, concern receding to make room for anger. "Is solitude calling? Do you have plans or something? Is this an intrusion?"

Arthit's eyelids droop and then close for a moment. He leans against the side of the door. When he opens his eyes, he says, "This isn't a good day for company."

"Sitting around drinking in the dark isn't going to make it any better."

"Poke," Arthit says. "Fuck you." He starts to close the door.

"Wait." Rafferty puts a hand against the door, expecting to have to push back, but the door just floats free of Arthit's hand and swings all the way open again. Arthit stands there, arms hanging down, hands loose at his sides, looking like a man who's just used all the strength he's been hoarding.

The pose is so naked that Rafferty can barely look at it. He looks down instead, at the porch between his feet. When it becomes clear that Arthit isn't going to spend any more energy trying to throw him out, he says, "Horner killed a girl. He tried to kill Rose. For all I know, he's killed a dozen of them."

Arthit doesn't say anything.

"I'm not expecting a rescue," Rafferty says. "But I could use some more information." He looks back at Arthit and says, "And you need to be doing something other than this."

"All you farang," Arthit says. He shakes his head. "You lack delicacy. No Thai would criticize me like that. Not at this time."

"I can't afford delicacy. And I have to tell you, Arthit, I'd probably be here kicking your door in even if I didn't have a problem."

Arthit says, "Precisely the point I was making. No Thai would."

"But I do have a problem."

"Wait," Arthit says. He squeezes his eyes shut and lets his head fall forward until his chin hits his chest. He takes a long breath and fills his cheeks and blows it out like someone surfacing from the deep, then lifts his head and shakes it back and forth quickly, the way a sleepy driver does when he needs to clear his head and refocus on the road. When he's finished, he grabs another breath, heaves a whiskey-laced sigh, and looks straight at Rafferty. "Tried to kill her."

"And did kill another one, another bar girl."

"Any chance at all she's wrong about him trying to kill her? Maybe he was just-"

"No."

Arthit steps back. "I suppose you should come in."

"Probably," Arthit says. He's sitting on the couch, next to a confused pile of clothes and magazines and DVD cases he'd swept out of his way before he sat down. "The pieces aren't hard to assemble. Immigration has the dates he was in the country, assuming he's using only one passport. And the cops down south actually do keep records of bodies that wash ashore, although probably not for more than, say, ten years. The problem is that nobody bothers about missing bar girls."

"No. Really?"

"It's not what you think." Arthit looks at the table in front of him, jumbled high with unopened mail, plastic utensils, and used paper plates, and then he says, "Well, it's not only what you think."

"What else is it?"

He rubs his eyes with his palms, almost grinding at them. "It's partly the girls. You know how it works. They go home. They go off with men. They get married to someone they just met. They move to a bar in Soi Cowboy or Nana Plaza. They decide it would be nice to work in Pattaya or Phuket and live at the beach. They get hired by a private club or an outcall service. They get sent to Singapore or Japan. They get a positive HIV test and don't want to scare their friends. They disappear all the time."

Rafferty says, to his knees, "Still." He's trying to keep from looking at the house, which is filthy.

"Yes," Arthit says. "It stinks. But that's how it is."

"Makes them ideal victims."

"Prostitutes everywhere. Half the serials in the world focus on them."

"No reason," Rafferty says, "for the Land of Smiles to be an exception."

"No. Because you're right. The other part of the problem, here and everywhere else, is that the cops don't care."

"Fine. So we forget asking about disappearing bar girls and concentrate on whether there's a pattern of women washing up around Phuket during or just after Horner's visits."

"You're assuming that he'd go back to the same place to do the girls."

"Can you suggest another assumption that gives us somewhere to start?

"You know," Arthit says, leaning back and lifting a bare foot. There's nowhere on the table to put it, so he uses the foot to sweep some of the junk onto the floor. Then he rests the foot on the table, the sole angled politely away from Rafferty. "I have to observe that this is suicidal behavior for a serial killer."

"What is? And why is this place so dark?"

"Because I like it dark. Coming back to the bar like that. He takes this girl-what's her name?"

"Oom."

"He takes Oom and does what he does to her, and a few months later he's back looking at Rose."

Rafferty says, "And?"

"And that can't be his pattern. No matter how lazy the cops are, someone, even if it's only the mama-san, is going to notice that every time this guy shows up, some girl vanishes."

"Lot of bars in a lot of places," Rafferty says. "Hundreds in Bangkok, God knows how many in Pattaya and Chiang Mai and Phuket, and who knows where else. He could snatch one per bar for years and years without ever repeating, without even getting within miles of a place he's hit before."

"That's what I'm saying, Poke." Arthit looks at the foot on the table and flexes his toes. "After Oom, why would he go back to the Candy Cane?"

"I don't know, Arthit," Rafferty says, feeling his face heat up. "Maybe Rose was special."

Arthit winces as though he's been hit, then lets his head fall forward so he can rub the back of his neck. "Of course. It's Rose, isn't it? Of course he came back."

Rafferty breathes deeply a couple of times to slow himself down. "Rose says the other one, Oom, was a real beauty."

"Cherry-picking," Arthit says. His face brightens a shade. "That should make the bar end of it a little easier. We don't need them to remember everybody who disappeared, only the most beautiful ones."

"I guess that helps."

"But like I just said, the girls move around. You'd figure he'd bump into some who remembered him."

Rafferty says, "I just spent six or seven hours inside a bar girl's life, and you have to remember that they see hundreds of thousands of men a year. Say they work three hundred fifty days and eight hundred men come into the bar each night. I can't do the math, but that's more than a quarter of a million. Unless Horner took one, she's going to forget about him in a week or two. They focus on the ones who give them money. The others are just scenery."

"The place for us to start," Arthit says, "is Phuket on one end and the Bangkok bars on the other."

"Not we," Rafferty says. "Me. And whoever else I can strong-arm. You lean on immigration, and I do the rest. You're working ten days a week as it is."

"I can do what I want," Arthit says. "I'm a public hero, remember?"

Arthit's been milking this ever since national television showed video of him killing someone who had just murdered a much-loved Thai millionaire.

Rafferty says, "Yes, but I mean-"

Arthit lifts a hand. "So I'll make the time."

Rafferty says, by way of preface, "Listen. And don't get mad at me."

Arthit shoots a glance toward the front door as though he's thinking about escaping through it. "I'm going to hate this, aren't I?"

"Look around."

"I don't have to. I see it every day."

"I mean, if you can make all this time, why don't you clean the damn house? It's not good for you, living like this."

Arthit says, "I don't want to move anything."

"Fine, fine. Don't move anything Noi touched. But this other junk, this crap… my mother, who has some good qualities, always says that even an angel can't live in a pigpen without turning into a pig."

"Does she," Arthit says. His eyes click on Rafferty's for a moment and then dart away.

"Well, no," Rafferty says. "I made that up. But you know what I mean."

Arthit nods slowly. "A moment ago we were talking about something important."

"This is important," Rafferty says.

They're both silent for a minute or two. Finally Rafferty reaches behind him and pulls the curtain open a couple of inches. The sunlight is merciless, and he lets it drop. "Jesus," he says. "At least ask Rose to get you a maid or something."

"I don't want a maid."

"Get a live-in. Her agency has a lot of women who need the work. You shouldn't be alone like this."

"This is exactly what I mean about farang. No Thai would be so presumptuous."

"That's what you get for making friends with me. Rose would be horrified to see this."

"But she'd have the sensitivity to leave me alone."

"Maybe, but this house didn't belong just to you."

A blink, almost heavy enough to be audible. "Your point?"

"It was Noi's house, too. It should be honored. What kind of way is this to honor her?"

"Poke." Arthit's tone is a warning.

"This isn't just sad, although Christ knows it's sad. This is the same as turning your back on her."

"That's enough."

"Who's going to say this if I don't?"

"Nobody." Arthit gets up. "And that'll be fine with me." He heads for the hallway. "I'll get all the dates from immigration. I'll get the picture, if they've got one, although all those pictures look like everyone. And I'll talk to the guys on the force in Phuket. I imagine you want this fast."

"Sure." Rafferty is still sitting. "He's here somewhere. He knows where we live. Rose and Miaow are home packing, scared half out of their minds."

Arthit stops walking, but he doesn't turn. "Where are you going to put them?"

"I don't know. Like I told Rose, the first thing is to get them ready to go. Some hotel in some obscure neighborhood."

Arthit says, "I'll be back."

Rafferty listens to his friend's footsteps, slow and heavy, the shuffle of a much older man, going down the hallway toward the kitchen. Then they stop. Without allowing himself to think about anything, Rafferty looks around. The dining room, always polished and immaculate when Noi was here, is a dim chiaroscuro, the table piled with dirty clothes, unopened newspapers, folded towels from the laundry, take-out cartons from restaurants, a few books, and several empty bottles labeled Johnnie Walker Black. Even the floor has junk on it, little islands of homeless uselessness, the kind of litter that's barely worth the effort of picking up and throwing away, the kind of stuff drunk people trip over. He can actually smell the dust in the air. It's impossible not to remember the bright, soft luster the place had eight or nine months ago-flowers, buffed surfaces, a gleam on the pale hardwood floors.

He comes to the present, realizing it's been a couple of minutes and he hasn't heard anything at all from the kitchen. No cupboards opening, no rattle of china, no running water. The house is so quiet he might as well be alone. A little foam of anxiety curdles in his stomach.

He gets up. "Arthit?"

After a moment Arthit says, "Just stay where you are."

Rafferty stays where he is, although he's got misgivings. To occupy his mind, he lifts the corner of the living-room drapes once more and lets the sun in. Depressed by what he sees, he drops it again. He decides he'll count to twenty and then go to the kitchen.

When he's reached eight, Arthit calls, "What are you doing for the next two hours?"

"Free as a bird," Rafferty says. "Get Rose and Miaow out of the apartment, find them a hotel, set them up, feed them. Plan the rest of my life. Other than that, nothing at all."

"Good," Arthit says. "Then you can give me a hand."

"Fine. I'll come back."

"No. Now." Rafferty hears the water run and then the sound of the teakettle being set on the gas stove, then the little poof as the gas ignites. Arthit comes in through the dining room. "We'll drink some Nescafe, and then you can help me straighten this place up."

"Any other time-"

"Don't be obtuse," Arthit says, trying to look cheerful and looking instead like someone whose smile is stuck in place and who's panicking behind it. "You'll bring them here."

Curtains wide, daylight washing the room like water, floor wide and empty. The magazines have been stacked by size in two plumb-straight piles. Three white plastic trash bags have been stuffed with spoiled food, cartons, disposable plates and utensils, used paper towels, empty Kleenex boxes, and old newspapers. The dining-room table is bare and shining. When Rafferty aimed the spray can of wax at it and pushed the button, releasing the scent of lemon, Arthit froze in the living room, bending over the coffee table as though his back had gone out and he couldn't straighten.

Rafferty had said, "Arthit?"

Arthit stayed where he was for a few seconds, and then he straightened, and with his back to Rafferty, he sniffled. "She loved that smell," he said.

"I remember. I never use this stuff without thinking of this house."

Now Arthit bends again as though to dust the table and then straightens again. "I haven't been waxing much."

"Gee," Rafferty says, watching his friend's back. "You'd never know."

"You have such a light hand with the irony."

"Want to do the kitchen?"

"Sure, it'll be easy. I've barely used it."

Rafferty picks up a couple of the garbage bags and throws them over one shoulder. The kitchen, located directly behind the dining room, can be reached either that way or through a hall that bypasses the guest bedroom, the bathrooms, and the room in which Arthit and Noi had slept. When Rafferty went past that room, half an hour ago, the door had been standing open, and he saw the bed, made up but wrinkled, with a little canyon on the bedspread and two dented pillows showing where his friend had been sleeping on top of the covers. Rafferty had a detailed vision, a tenth of a second long, of Arthit deciding every night not to turn the blankets down, and his breath caught in his throat.

He crosses the kitchen and opens the back door, not looking at the abandoned garden, and puts the bags outside. Arthit comes in through the hallway with the other plastic bag and a wad of damp paper towels, detours around Rafferty, and goes through the door to set them out. He straightens and stands there for a moment, hands on hips, looking at the wasteland that used to be a garden.

Rafferty runs water and passes a musty-smelling sponge under it. The kitchen, as advertised, is relatively neat, although dusty. He squeezes the extra water from the sponge and swipes it over the kitchen counters. "We're going to need some more paper towels."

From the doorway Arthit says, "Under the sink."

Kneeling hurts Rafferty's back, reminding him that he was up, sitting essentially in one position, all night long. The pain sharpens his memory of Rose's story and brings a question to the surface. "He's here, Horner is. He's got to want to get to Rose, maybe all of us. Why hasn't he done anything?"

He opens the cupboard door and settles back on his heels, his question forgotten.

"Something to think about," Arthit says, coming in. He looks down at Rafferty, who's staring at the space beneath the sink and says, "Shit."

"This is impressive," Rafferty says. He pulls out a big plastic tub piled high with empty whiskey bottles.

"You should see the ones I left in the bars," Arthit says. He comes over to Rafferty. "Give me that."

Rafferty slides it over to him, and Arthit picks it up with a little grunt.

"Maybe it is impressive," he says, putting it down again and dragging it across the floor toward the back door.

Rafferty's phone rings. He stands, fishes it out of his jeans, and says, "Ahh, my skyscraper darling."

"We're on the way," Rose says. "All of us."

"Good. We're pretty much ready." He thinks for a second about what she's said, and he asks, " 'All'? What happened to 'both'?"

"All," Rose says.

Rafferty says, "Oh. Well, don't forget the circling and double-backs and all that."

"Thanks," Rose says. "I never would have remembered." She hangs up, and he folds the phone and turns to Arthit, who's coming back in. He says, "I'm sorry about this. I think we've got one extra coming."

Arthit stops, obviously processing the information, and then he tries on the smile again. It looks like he's got gas. "No problem," he says. "Invite everyone you know."