The Queen of Patpong

Chapter 4

"He's having fun," Rose says, giving the word a bitter twist. "Terrifying people, threatening them. Playing with them. This is his idea of a joke."

It's a few minutes after 10:00 A.M., and the day is well into its long, slow sizzle. The living room is bright enough to make Rafferty, whiskey-sensitive, wish he were wearing dark glasses. Rose is curled on the couch, brown knees drawn up protectively, wearing a man's T-shirt, size quadruple-X, with a picture of Wile E. Coyote on it, above a pair of cutoff jeans. Circles are thumb-smudged beneath her eyes. Miaow, who's barely spoken all morning, sits perched on the edge of the chair at Rafferty's desk, decked out in one of her usual immaculate weekend outfits: pressed lemon-yellow jeans and a severely white T-shirt, unsullied by anything as vulgar as a design. Rafferty can't see himself, and he has no idea what he's wearing.

Sunday or not, Arthit is in uniform. For the past eight months, he's been putting in six- and sometimes seven-day weeks. His face looks crumpled. He's lost at least six kilos, and the lines on his forehead and around his eyes and mouth have deepened. He could probably slip four fingers inside the buttoned collar of his shirt.

For the first time since they met, Rafferty thinks, his friend looks old.

"Howard Horner," Arthit says. "And you think he's military."

Rafferty looks to Rose, but she says nothing, so he says, "Has to be."

"He never talked about it," Rose finally says. "He said he was in business, but he looked like a soldier."

Arthit says, "Do you actually know whether that's his name? Did you ever see anything with his name on it? A passport, driver's license, anything?"

"No," Rose says. "But that was his name. His cell phone rang all the time, and he answered it, 'Horner.' Not hello or anything, just Horner. Like he was the only one in the world."

"That's all?"

"No," she says, after a moment. "They called him Mr. Horner at his hotel." She plucks the bottom of the T-shirt and looks down at Wile E. Coyote. "At all the hotels."

"Need a passport to check in to a hotel," Rafferty says. There's a faint pulse beating at his right temple. "So he's got a passport that says 'Horner' anyway."

"And he came and went, you said." Arthit is on the hassock with his notebook positioned in front of him on the glass-topped table. He's made half a page of notes.

"He'd usually stay a month or so," Rose says. "Then he'd be gone for a while and come back."

"How long between visits?"

"Maybe three months, maybe more." She squints into the past. "Maybe less. It's hard to say. I hadn't been in Bangkok long. Everything was new to me. Some weeks felt like months, some months felt like days. I was fighting for my life in the bar, trying to figure out how to tell friends from enemies, trying to get over being terrified all the time. I wasn't keeping track of anything, just trying to get through the nights."

"Don't think about that one for a minute," Arthit says. "Maybe it'll come. When did you first see him?"

Rose rubs her upper arms as though she's cold, although the living-room temperature is into the eighties. "A few weeks after I got here. I know that because it was near my birthday. I got here in July, and my birthday is in September."

"That's how many years ago?"

"Thirteen." She glances at Rafferty. "No. Fourteen. I've been with Poke five years."

"So he came into the bar," Arthit prompts.

"I don't want to talk about that. I mean, I do, but I need to explain things to Poke and Miaow, not just answer questions like this."

"Fine," Arthit says. "Can you remember anything he said about himself? What he did, where he went when he left here, anything like that?"

"He told me he came from England."

"He's American," Rafferty and Miaow correct her, almost in unison.

Rose straightens, looking from one of them to the other. "I know," she says. "I didn't know then that there was a part of America called England."

"There isn't," Miaow says. It's nearly a snap.

"New England?" Arthit asks.

Rose nods but doesn't speak. She's gazing at Miaow, who's searching for something in her own lap. Finally Rose says, "Yes. New England. Someplace with a V. I remember that because he laughed at the way I pronounced it. I said"-her face clears for a moment as she remembers-"Wermont. I called it Wermont."

"Like wampire," Arthit says. "Thais say wampire."

"Like that," Rose says, the animation fading from her face. "Wermont." She makes a knot out of her fingers. "Wampire."

"When he was here for these-what? — one-month stays…"

"Something like that. Sometimes longer."

"Did he ever leave the country for a short time, a few days, and come back? Would we find multiple entries in immigration?"

"No," Rose says.

"Here a month or more, every time. No need to go back to wherever he earned his living. You're sure."

"I'm sure," Rose says, and buries the lower half of her face in her coffee cup.

"How?" Arthit asks.

Rose looks at Miaow and then lets her eyes slide to the floor. "Because I was with him."

"The whole time?"

"Yes. He paid the bar fine for a month in advance every time," she says.

Arthit makes a note, but Rafferty recognizes it as just something to do, a way of masking his discomfort. Rafferty, who is standing beside the kitchen counter, goes into the kitchen and tops up his cup, which is still full. He doesn't want to go back into the living room. What he wants to do is leave the apartment, go out into the oven of the day, find Howard Horner, and kill him. Kill the other one-what was his name? — John. Kill John, too.

But he breathes several times all the way to the depth of his belly and goes back in. Instead of stopping at the counter, he goes to the couch and sits next to Rose. Puts a hand on the smooth warmth of her thigh. Rose doesn't seem to notice.

"Why is this important?" he asks Arthit. "Whether he came and went, I mean."

"It's a pattern," Arthit says. "It feels military, or quasi-military. So many months on, a month off."

"Either he's military or he was," Rafferty says. "All you have to do is see him walk."

"Rose stabbed his hand," Miaow says suddenly. "He didn't even pull it back. You know, when you touch something hot, the way you yank your hand back? He didn't do that. He just left the hand there, like he was waiting for her to stab it again." Her voice is higher and younger than usual.

"It was a display," Rafferty said. "It was a macho, four-testicle display. Like that old bullshit about holding your hand over the fire. 'I've got more testosterone in the cleft in my manly chin than you have in your entire body.' "

"It isn't something many men could do," Rose says. "It might be a display, but you should take it seriously, Poke."

"Yeah, Rose?" Rafferty's voice is more truculent than he would like it to be. "What's it supposed to tell me?"

"That you can break his bones but he'll keep coming at you. You're not going to win a fight with Howard, because he won't stop until you're dead."

Rafferty says, "We'll see."

"Poke," Rose begins, but she lets the energy fizzle out and shakes her head.

"So," Rafferty says to Arthit, around the ball of heat in his chest. "Can you talk to immigration?"

"Sure I can," Arthit says. "Whether they'll answer me is another issue. What do you want from them?"

"Confirmation that Howard Horner is his name. A photo, if they keep the ones those cute little cameras take at passport control. What he lists as his occupation. Where his flights originate. How often he comes. Whether he's left."

Miaow says, "Left?"

"We were wrong last night," Rafferty says. "He could find the apartment. But he didn't do any real harm, did he? Assuming that he meant to. You could knock that door over with a blunt remark, but he didn't come in and kill anyone. Maybe that would have been too easy. Or maybe he didn't have time to play with us. Maybe he had to leave the country, go wherever the hell he goes. So he buys a can of paint and he and his jerk friend paint the X on the door just to make us sweat, and then they go and get their plane. Maybe hoping we'll move by the time he gets back and he can have the fun of finding us all over again."

Arthit says, "Maybe he already knew where you lived. Maybe he spotted Rose months ago and followed her here, did a little research, maybe paid a cop. Maybe the meeting in the cafe was part of his game."

Rose says, "And maybe he's down in the street right now, enjoying the fact that he frightened us. Maybe he'll be back tonight. This is what he does. He plays with people before he- Before."

Miaow gets up as though she has somewhere to go and then sits down again.

"I can request all that information from immigration," Arthit says. "They won't have today's records. If he left today, that'll still be in the computers. And I can show that bird's claw around, see if it means anything to anybody," There's a drag of unwillingness in his voice. "And I know this feels serious to you. To all of you. But you're making this guy sound like a maniac."

"A what?" Rose says in Thai.

Arthit translates.

Rose says, "That's what he is, Arthit. A maniac."

Arthit has gone back to the station to start asking questions, and Miaow has retired to her room with her copy of The Tempest to work on her lines and, Rafferty thinks, to get out of whatever room Rose is in. The pressure of the silence in the apartment chases him out of it, and it's almost noon when he comes back up from a short random wander, capped by a stop at the sidewalk restaurant a block away to pick up everyone's favorite food, a gesture that feels futile even before he's paid for it. He finds Rose sitting out on the balcony with the door open behind her, smoking and looking at the city.

He puts the take-out containers on the kitchen counter and goes to the balcony door. "Are you hungry? It's a thousand degrees out here."

"I'm Thai," Rose says without turning. "This is how it is in Thailand."

"That doesn't mean it's not hot."

"So it should be cooler? Has the climate made a mistake?"

"Sorry?"

"It's hot," Rose says. "That's how it is. Life isn't fair sometimes either. That doesn't mean that it's supposed to be or not supposed to be. That's just how it is."

"You don't believe that."

"I do. You'd believe it, too, if you hadn't grown up with all those choices." Her back still to him, she lifts a hand and starts ticking off fingers. " 'Let's see, shall I go to college or run away to Asia and try to find my father? Or write books? Or live here? Or there? Or get married? Or adopt a daughter? Or do it all at once?' "

"That's not what it felt like when it was happening."

"Not to you. It wouldn't. You have no idea how privileged you were. You could choose this or that, and it wouldn't matter much if you chose wrong. 'Uh-oh, better go back and give it another try.' Nobody pulled you out of school at harvest every year so you could help raise the kids and work in the fields. Nobody was waiting for you to earn money so they could keep their house or feed your brothers and sisters."

"Poor little farm girl," he says. "Are you done?"

"I don't know. I don't even know why I started. My own daughter is hiding from me."

"That's not like the heat," Rafferty says. "That's something you can do something about."

"Maybe."

Impatience crests inside him. "Of course it is."

She starts to says something, then shakes her head and says, "Leave me alone."

"Fine." He steps back into the room. "If you get hungry, come in and eat."

She says, "Close the door."

He slides the door closed, with a little more force than required, and stalks down the hall to Miaow's room. She has the frowny face out, just a rectangle of shirt cardboard that features an unhappy-looking, crayon-scrabbled roundhead, traced around a pie tin. The other side, the smiley face, means come in, and this side doesn't. Rafferty hasn't seen either face in almost a year. He thought she'd thrown them away a long time ago.

He hesitates and then knocks.

"Go away," Miaow says.

"That's what everybody says. I'm lonely."

"Ohhhh, phoo. Just a minute."

He waits, and a moment later he hears the door unlock, and Miaow pulls it open about four inches and looks up at him. "What?"

"Are you hungry? I brought back some larb kai, extra spicy."

She pulls her mouth to one side. "What else?"

"Vietnamese spring rolls, the ones you like, that aren't cooked, with mint and shrimp in them."

"Coke?"

Rafferty draws a breath to slow himself down before he replies. "You mean, did I buy Coke or is there some Coke left?"

"I don't know," she says. "I just want Coke."

"Then you'll probably get some. Seems to me you usually get what you want."

"Boy," she says. "Everybody's really awful today."

Rafferty says, "I hadn't noticed."