The Queen of Patpong

Chapter 7

Nam Pla Prik He's already running when the phone vibrates and then rings again, and he stops and answers, but no one is there. Instead he gets one of those twirling barber-pole lines that means something is downloading, and a moment later he's staring at an out-of-focus close-up of Pim, her eyes taking up half her face, looking like someone who's just opened the door to death.

He runs across the soi and jumps up the steps to the open-air restaurant where he and Pim had sat. The woman who waited on them looks apprehensive as she watches him come, moving behind her counter just in case.

"Nam soda," Rafferty gasps. "Soda water. In the bottle. Orange juice to go. Hurry."

"You take bottle? Extra baht if you take-"

"Yeah, yeah. Here." He throws another hundred-baht note on the counter and shifts helplessly from foot to foot as the woman opens the cooler at Thai speed and pulls out a bottle of soda.

"Not so cold," she says doubtfully.

"I don't care. Open it and give it to me. Get the orange juice."

The woman pops the cap, releasing a spurt of soda, a sure sign that it's warm. Rafferty snatches it from her right hand and plucks the cap from the counter. As she prepares the orange juice, he pours out about a third of the soda, making a bubbling puddle at his feet. He snaps the bent cap back on as tightly as he can, shoves the bottle into the center of the back of his pants, against the gully of his spine, and tugs the T-shirt free so it hangs loose over his jeans. In the meantime the woman has taken a clear plastic bag and filled it halfway with orange juice, then stuck a straw into it, twisted the bag around the straw, and with expert quickness wrapped a rubber band around the bag to create a tight seal. She hands it to him and watches openmouthed as he undoes the rubber band, pulls the straw out, and pours the orange juice onto the concrete floor. Then he turns to the selection of condiments and picks up a clear glass bowl of nam pla prik, fish sauce with hundreds of tiny, fiery red and green peppers floating in it. He upends the bowl of chili sauce into the bag, replaces the straw, and reseals the bag with the rubber band. He wraps his right hand loosely around the bag and takes off at a dead run toward the Beer Garden.

He veers left, into the alley. John and his friends, if he has any with him, will be watching the entrance. If Rafferty goes in through the entrance, he'll have no options at all.

As he tears around the corner of the second alley to the right, he finds himself at the base of the eight-foot wall at the back of the Beer Garden. The Beer Garden is essentially open-air, although a roof has been built over the central area, covering the bar and the restaurant booths to the right of the door. But the roof is raised on poles; it doesn't join the walls in most places, and back here, where the kitchen and the restrooms are, there's a gap between the top of the wall and the roof, to let out heat and odors.

If Rafferty can get in here, he'll be at the back of the establishment, near the kitchen and the restrooms and behind everyone in the main room who's facing the doorway.

But the wall rises eight feet, and eight feet is too high. He could jump and get his hands on top of the wall, but there's no way he could hold on, much less climb up.

The area at the base of the wall is shaded by the umbrellas of vendors-a shoeshine man, a guy who repairs disposable lighters for a few pennies, a barber, complete with chair and mirror. About five feet from the wall, a woman carefully sews the hem of a skirt that's apparently been plucked from an overflowing basket beside her. She's using an antique sewing machine powered by a foot treadle. It's a heavy machine, and the old oak table it rests on looks like it's supported its burden for decades without so much as a creak of protest. Rafferty grips the bag of nam pla prik between his teeth, setting the tip of his tongue on fire, says "Shorry," grabs the table, and drags it to the base of the wall.

The woman calls after him, but by the time anyone has registered what he's doing, Rafferty is balanced on the table, feet on either side of the sewing machine. The table is a little more than three feet high, so he can get both arms over the top of the wall and haul himself up. The woman is still yelling at him and drawing a crowd, so he extracts yet another hundred-baht bill and lets it flutter down.

Because of the bottle tucked into the back of his pants, he has to go over the wall on his stomach. He hears women's voices, indignant and scolding, behind him, and when he turns, he sees a group of eight or ten Beer Garden regulars, women of various ages and shapes, tightly clustered around an open door. They look angry and upset, and some of them are trying to push others forward, through the door. The women at the front hold back, obviously unwilling or afraid to go in.

One of the women at the rear spots Rafferty and waves him to hurry. He palms the bag of chili sauce and covers the distance at a run. The women part, and he's looking into the men's room.

It's not much-a row of urinals with those round pink cakes in them that somebody somewhere thinks smell better than piss, a filthy once-white tile floor, a couple of sinks to the left of the door, and three toilet cubicles with a great many words scratched into them.

John is standing with his back against the wall of the center cubicle. He's sweating heavily, and there's a mean-looking six-inch knife in his hand, which he's using to try to get the crowd of women to back up. Crumpled on the floor beside him, leaning against the door of the right-hand cubicle, her face a twist of pain and her left arm hanging uselessly in her lap, is Pim. Her shoes lie on their sides next to her, and the bandage around her ankle is soiled from the floor. Tears have eroded deep, wet tracks through her cakey makeup from her eyes to her jawline. A teardrop dangles from her chin.

Rafferty eases the last woman aside and says to John, "Get away from her."

"The hero," John says. "Send in a girl. What an asswipe. Come on in here, asswipe."

"You're fucked," Rafferty says. "I don't think Howard is going to like this at all."

"The hell with Howard," John says, but he sounds less certain. "Get in here."

"Yeah? What do you think you're going to do? Cut me in front of all these ladies? Fight your way out of here with me bleeding in the bathroom? Howard will love that, his fifth-rate jerkwater backup in jail, charged with stupidity. What were you supposed to do? Follow me. Find out where I went. Get a little information. Report back to Howard, wherever Howard is. Instead here you are, stuck in a toilet with a knife in your hand." Rafferty comes just inside the door. "Where's Howard?"

John says, "Fuck yourself," and flourishes the knife, doing a gleaming, professional-looking, little back-and-forth razzle-dazzle, but Rafferty ignores it. Either the man will use it or he won't.

"I asked you a question."

John puts the tip of his tongue to his upper lip and then retracts it. "And I told you what you can do, if your dick is long enough to stick it up your ass."

"I also told you to get away from her."

"Man," John says, "you are so not listening."

Rafferty's got no moves that will protect him from a blade. What he can do, if he can work up the courage, is to offer John another target. He takes a longer look at Pim, who is staring up at him wet-eyed, slumped slightly to the side to try to ease the weight of her damaged left arm. He flips a mental coin, and it comes up heads: John would prefer not to use the knife. So Rafferty grabs a deep breath and brushes past the man as though he's not there, barely bothering to sidestep the knife, and bends down over Pim, practically waving in John's face the freshly bandaged left elbow.

John seizes the advantage, grabs the bandages, and squeezes for all he's worth, with explosive results. Rafferty lets out a bellow of pain, straightens convulsively, and through a sort of red haze he brings his right hand, with the plastic bag in it, up into John's face. When the straw is pointed at the other man's eyes, Rafferty squeezes the bag.

His own cry is still ragged in his throat, but even so he can hear John howl. John yanks his head back, slamming it against the wall of the toilet cubicle and scrubbing at his eyes with his forearm as Rafferty reaches back, lifts his T-shirt, and brings out the heavy soda bottle, clutching it by the neck. With an effort that begins at the soles of his feet, he slams the bottle against the side of John's head, so hard that the bottle almost flies out of his hand. There's a surprising crack, a sound that nearly persuades Rafferty he's broken the man's skull. John's knees accordion outward like he's doing a dance step, and he goes down. Rafferty whacks him again for insurance as he drops, hitting his ear this time. John crumples on the floor like a loose sack, looking as though he has no muscles in his body.

Rafferty stands over him, panting, making sure the man is out. From beneath John's head, blood begins to pool across the tile floor. The women standing in the doorway break into applause.

Taking it one deliberate step at a time, Rafferty puts the bottle down carefully, not spilling the remaining soda, and kneels beside John. He pries the knife from the man's hand, tosses the blade against the opposite wall, and puts a couple of fingers over John's pulse, which is reassuringly strong and steady. As if on cue, the man moans, and Pim lets out a squeak of terror and scrabbles away from him, using her good arm to pull her along.

"I need a belt," Rafferty says in Thai to the women in the doorway. They're pushing at each other now, peering in at the flattened man and the injured girl. A woman in front, older and tattooed and somehow familiar, unbuckles her belt, slips it free of her jeans, and throws it to him.

She says, in English, "Here, Poke," and Rafferty takes his eyes off the belt to look at her, and it falls at his feet, the heavy buckle making an echoing clank as it hits the tile.

"Move," Rafferty says to Pim, and when she's scooted farther away, he rolls John over onto his stomach, yanks his arms behind his back, and makes a tight figure eight with the belt, wrapping it around and between the arms just above the elbows, Khmer Rouge style, where John won't be able to reach it with his hands. When he's tugged it as tight as he can, he secures the buckle and takes a quick look at John's scalp. The bottle broke the skin, but there doesn't seem to be any real damage, just the usual aggressive bleeding from a scalp wound. He rolls John onto his back again.

"Hold still," he says to Pim. He puts his hand on her left shoulder and probes it gently. She lets out a shrill yelp. "Dislocated," he says. "Stay where you are."

Pim says, around a sniffle, "But-"

"Do what I say. If you move around, it'll hurt more." He turns to the woman who threw him the belt. He's suddenly immensely weary. "I'm sorry. I know you, but I can't remember your name."

"Lan," she says. "I dance King's Castle long time. Before, me friend for Rose."

"Right, right. Sorry, Lan. Where's security? They should be here by now."

"You want?"

"No, I don't. If they come, try to keep them out, okay?"

"Okay. Him." She points her foot at John, a gesture of contempt. "Him boxing her. Bang, take her hair, pull her."

"Well, he's not going to enjoy the next few minutes." John moans again, and Rafferty gets up, turns on the water in the sink, cups his hands beneath the spout, and throws the water at John. He does it three or four times, and then John's eyes are open. He struggles once against the belt, takes a quick look around the bathroom-at Rafferty, at the huddled Pim, at the band of angry women. His eyes find the knife on the other side of the room, and he goes still. He's not even looking at Rafferty.

"What's your full name?" Rafferty asks, kneeling beside him again.

"Fuck you," John says. He's looking past Rafferty at the wall.

Rafferty picks up the soda bottle, which feels like it weighs ten pounds. "If I hit you in exactly the same place, it's going to get your attention." He wiggles the bottle by its neck.

John closes his eyes and slowly opens them again. "Bohnert. John Bohnert."

"Spell it."

"B-o-h-n-e-r-t."

"What did you think you were doing today? When I saw you on Sukhumvit."

"Looking for a library. I'm a big reader."

"Who else was following us?"

The question provokes a surprised contraction of Bohnert's eyebrows, quickly smoothed away. Then he shakes his head.

"Was somebody else following Rose?"

Bohnert squirms for a moment, testing the strength of the belt, and Rafferty puts an open hand on the man's throat and presses down, hard. "Stay put and I'll let you breathe. I asked whether anyone was following Rose."

Rafferty lifts his hand, and Bohnert coughs. "Who's Rose?"

"Be like that," Rafferty says. "But listen. You're going to tell me what I want to know, and you really ought to do it the easy way. So I can feel good about myself when this is over."

"Have I said 'fuck you' yet?"

"Well, it's a good thing my self-esteem is solid," Rafferty says. "Otherwise I might regret doing this."

He picks up the bottle of soda and holds it to the light, checking the level. Still about two-thirds full. John winces at the sight of it and draws his head away, but Rafferty pops the cap with his thumb, puts the bottle down again, and pulls the straw out of the bag of chili sauce.

There's a murmur among the women gathered at the door. Three or four of them are whispering to others.

"You know this one, do you?" he asks them. Even Pim is watching now, although she looks puzzled. She hasn't been here long enough to learn the trick, which owes its existence to the limitless imagination and limited resources of the Thai police.

"A friend of mine who's a cop told me about this. It's not a complicated recipe," Rafferty says to Bohnert, who's working on looking impassive, his eyes once again on the wall. "The trick is to get the proportions right. Also, it works better if you can grind the chilies to a paste, but this is an improvisation."

He gathers the open end of the bag of chili sauce into a tight bunch and works it into the neck of the soda bottle. Then he upends the bag and squeezes on it again so the nam pla prik flows into the soda water, turning it the color of weak tea with lots of little red and green bits floating in it. To Bohnert he says, "You following this?"

Bohnert says nothing.

"One more chance," Rafferty says, hoping the man will cooperate. He's seeing little bright flashes at the corners of his vision, and he can hear his blood singing high and thin in his ears. His voice sounds distant, as though he's hearing it through a wall. "One more chance for us both to walk out of here feeling relatively okay. Where's Horner?"

Bohnert says, "You're dead. You and the whore and the midget. You're dead."

Rafferty says, "I'm sorry you feel that way." He puts his thumb tightly over the top of the bottle and shakes it vigorously as the women's voices rise in expectation. When he can feel that the pressure's increased as much as it's going to, he brings the Coke bottle up to Bohnert's nose, removes his thumb, and jams the bottle into the left nostril.

Coca-Cola spurts out of Bohnert's nose and over Rafferty's hand, and John's knees unbend spasmodically, scissoring in both directions. Rafferty rises and steps back as Bohnert thrashes on the floor, coughing and choking, and then the chili hits, and he roars and jackknifes and then straightens, kicking his feet out so fast that he cracks both shins against the vertical support of the toilet cubicle, and he twists back and forth, rocking on his bound arms, hacking and spitting and sobbing simultaneously.

Rafferty's voice feels like it's being forced through a sieve. "Where's Horner?" His phone begins to ring.

Bohnert's eyes are streaming water, but he pulls his mouth tight and spits at Rafferty.

As his phone continues to ring, Rafferty bends over John and says between his teeth, "There's lots left. Let's try again." He puts his thumb over the bottle and starts to shake it.

"No," Bohnert says. It's mostly breath.

The phone stops ringing. "Why were you following us?"

"See… where you went. Who you know."

"Why?"

Bohnert's nose is running, and he sniffs, which is a mistake that registers instantly. He blows out explosively and makes a retching sound that turns into another fit of coughing. When it's over, he lies still except for deep, shuddering breaths, and Rafferty says again, "Why?"

"Pressure points," Bohnert says. "Looking… for pressure points."

Rafferty's phone rings again. He looks at it and sees ROSE.

"What does Horner want with her?"

"Don't know."

"Fine." Rafferty puts the phone into his pocket and shakes the bottle again. John is pushing back with his legs, trying to scrabble away, under the wall of the toilet cubicle. A couple of the women laugh.

"He… he says she tried to kill him."

"Why?"

"Don't know. Really, really. He wanted-Howard wanted-to marry her."

"He…" Rafferty stands there, the bottle dangling heavy in his hand, feeling as if a building just fell on him. "Marry her?

"He asked her, she said yes. That's what he says."

"True or false?" He shakes the bottle again,

"True, true. Ask her. Ask her, not me." Bohnert's voice breaks like an adolescent's.

"And where is old Howard?"

"I… I can't."

"Sure you can. Unless you want to sneeze blood for the next week."

Bohnert's face softens, and he starts to cry like a child, and Rafferty, with no pleasure, recognizes a self-shattering sense of shame. "He's in… he's in Afghanistan," Bohnert says.

"Call Dr. Ratt," Rafferty says into the phone. "Tell him-"

"You went after him, didn't you?" Rose demands, her tone as sharp as broken glass. "That man, the one who was with Howard. How stupid can-"

"I'm not up for an argument." The sweat he smells now is his own, his T-shirt wet and heavy beneath his arms. "Call Dr. Ratt. Get him and Nui there now."

"And you got yourself hurt," Rose says. "You saw them, you saw how they were, and now-"

"It's not me. And will you please-" Beside him, on the backseat of the cab, Pim shifts her weight away from him and whimpers.

"Then who?"

"Goddamn it, will you please do what I'm asking you to do?" He is suddenly so furious that his mouth tastes like metal. "Will you just fucking do what I want?"

Pim pulls farther away, leaning against the door.

There is a long pause. Then Rose says, in a voice he's never heard before, "You sound like a customer."

He is trying to think of something to say when he hears her disconnect. ROSE'S EYES ARE stones when she opens the door, but the moment she sees Pim, her face softens. "You poor baby," she says in Thai. "You've been crying." Her eyes flick to Rafferty's bandage, but she makes no comment, just gathers Pim in.

Behind Rose, Dr. Ratt's wife, Nui, gives Pim a sharp-eyed glance. "It's a new one," she says in English, calling toward the kitchen. Rafferty can hear water running, so the doctor is probably washing his hands.

"How long have you been in Bangkok?" Rose has wrapped a long arm carefully around the girl. Pim's chin is dimpling at the sympathy.

"Three weeks," she says. Even less time than Rafferty had guessed.

"And what's the problem?" Rose asks in Thai. "Did my husband beat you up?"

"No," Pim says. "He was wonderful. He stuck a bottle right up the man's nose."

"Did he?" Rose says, without a glance at Rafferty. She guides Pim toward the counter between the living room and the kitchen. "Sometimes he's nice by accident."

"Ahh, our patients have arrived," Dr. Ratt says in what he imagines to be a soothing tone but has always sounded to Rafferty like the voice of an amateur who's somehow gotten on the radio. "Who needs to be looked at first?"

"Sorry to disappoint everyone," Rafferty says, "but this is nothing." He raises the bandaged elbow. "I'm fine."

"Oh, well. That won't last long, the way you live. Who's our little friend here?"

"My name is Pim," Pim says, looking dazzled. Dr. Ratt and Nui are dressed like a cross between medical personnel and slumming angels, he in a white tunic that looks like something Nehru might have worn if Nehru had been a doctor, with a stethoscope gleaming around his neck for effect, and Nui in the latest of a long line of hand-tailored all-silk nurse's outfits. The two of them have made a fortune by defeating Bangkok's fearsome traffic, putting multiple teams of doctors and nurses in cars twenty-four hours a day on the assumption that often enough, when a call comes in, there will be a team nearby. A lot of the profit has gone into clothes. Faced with their soigne urban elegance, Pim folds her arms around her middle to cover some of her bare brown skin and appears even more uncomfortable than before.

"Mmmm," Dr. Ratt says, giving her a closer look. "Dislocated, is it?"

"It is," Rafferty says.

"When I need a layman's opinion." Dr. Ratt says, without glancing up, "you probably won't be the layman I ask."

"When everyone hates you," Rafferty says, "drink beer." He goes into the kitchen and pulls the refrigerator door open.

"Well, now," Dr. Ratt says, with a "come here" glance at Nui. Between them they maneuver Pim onto one of the stools at the counter and then swivel the stool so she's got her back to the kitchen and is facing into the living room. She sits there, hunched over protectively, looking from one of them to the other, as though she's trying to decide which of them will bite her first.

"This is going to hurt," Dr. Ratt says, taking her left wrist. "Only for a second, though, and then it'll be fine."

"But-" Pim says, just as Dr. Ratt brings the arm up, twists it slightly, and pushes, and it pops into the socket, accompanied by a squeal from Pim that goes through Rafferty's ears like a smoking wire.

"There," Dr. Ratt says. Pim is bent double, holding her shoulder. "Better?"

"Yes," she says, "but it hurts."

"Well, I lied about that. It'll be sore until tomorrow. But it doesn't hurt like before, does it?"

"Oh, no."

"He did this to her?" Rose asks. It is an accusation.

"John," Rafferty says. "The other one. John Bohnert. He's not as dangerous as he thinks he is."

"Don't you fool yourself," Rose says.

"He told me something interesting."

"Hard to believe," Rose says. Dr. Ratt, Nui, and Pim are watching the two of them, unwilling to interrupt.

"What?" says a new voice, and Rafferty looks around the kitchen door to see Miaow. "What was that noise?" Miaow gives Pim a glance that takes in the garish makeup and the cheap clothes, then dismisses her. "And who's this?"

"Her name is Pim," Rose says, all ice. "Not 'this.' "

"You're grumpy," Miaow says, turning back toward her room. "And he's got bandages on and he's drinking beer. Call me when dinner's ready."

"Hello," Pim says, but Miaow keeps walking.

"You were just spoken to," Rose says to Miaow's back.

"Well," Dr. Ratt says, "if no one else is hurt, we should probably be going."

"Yeah, hello," Miaow mumbles, without slowing.

"You turn around right now," Rose says. "Who are you to be so rude?"

"It's all right," Pim says.

Miaow stops, wheels around, and impales Rose with a glare. "Why are you so mean?"

"That's it," Nui says, grabbing her husband's arm. To Rafferty she says, "Call us if this gets medical." She hauls Dr. Ratt toward the door.

"I haven't paid you," Rafferty says.

"For that? Forget it." Nui is already opening the door, but the doctor puts a hand on the jamb to keep from being towed out of the room. "If you get a chance," he says, "mention us in one of those magazines you write for." He nods to Pim. "Nice to meet you, young lady."

Pim gives a high wai of respect to the door, which is already swinging shut behind him. She calls out, "Thank you," but the closing of the door cuts the phrase in half. To Rafferty she says, eyes shining, "He's a real doctor."

"He is," Rafferty says. "And he's got manners, too."

"Oh, blah, blah, blah," Miaow says. "Why doesn't everybody just yell at me?"

"Miaow," Rafferty says, "I know it's hard, at your age, to believe that there's anything that's not about you, but it's true."

"Oh?" Miaow says, and her chin juts out in challenge. "So you're yelling at me because of what? Because of Rose? Or maybe her?" She flips a thumb at Pim. "Or the guys in the restaurant? Or whoever hurt your stupid arm? Like, what, it's an accident that I'm the one you're yelling at? If someone else was standing here, would you be yelling at them instead of me? Fine. I won't stand here anymore. One of you can stand here and let him yell at you." She turns and stalks down the hall, and a moment later the door to her room slams.

Rose stands, looking after her as though she'd vanished through a wall. She seems distant enough to be reconsidering her entire life. Rafferty drains his beer and thinks about getting another. Then Rose says to Pim, "We're not usually like this."

Pim glances at Rafferty, looking for help, but he's staring into the refrigerator. She says, "Oh." She makes fluttering gestures with her fingers, but no words come.

"This is not a good job," Rose says, her voice flat. "What you've come to Bangkok to do. It's not good for you."

"My parents," Pim says. "And there are five kids." She puts a brown hand flat on her bare knee, fingers spread wide, and stares down at it. She swivels on the stool, and her hot pants glitter. "Everybody needs money," she finally says.

"I know," Rose says. Then she says, "Poke. Get me a beer."

"Gee," Rafferty says. "You're speaking to me." He pulls a Singha out of the refrigerator and says to Pim, "Want one?"

She shakes her head. "I don't drink."

"See?" Rose says over the hiss and fizz as Rafferty pops the cap. "You're a good girl. I know it feels like there's nothing else you can do, but you're wrong. You have no idea how wrong you are. You think you'll do it for a while, a few years, and then it'll all be over, but you're wrong. It's never really over. I haven't danced in more than five years, I'm married, I have a husband and a daughter, and it still comes up and kicks me in the teeth."

"You danced?" Pim says. She blows out a deep breath of admiration. "You must have made big money. I'll bet you got all-nights, maybe even weeks. I'm not beautiful like you. I usually have to wait until they're drunk before one of them picks me, and then it's a short-time. Nobody ever wants me to stay all night." She rubs her palms over her thighs as though she's cold. "I hate going home after, at three or four in the morning with money in my pocket, dressed like this. It frightens me."

"It should all frighten you," Rose says, taking the beer from Rafferty. "You see how disrespectful my daughter just was? That's because she's ashamed of me. My daughter. She could barely look at you because of what you do. And she was a street kid just a few years ago, so it's not like she shits silk. Is that what you want? Someday, after you fuck a thousand drunk men, and defend yourself against the ones who hate women, and avoid getting AIDS, and save your money, and maybe even buy a little house, if you're not like all the other girls who spend the money as fast as it comes and lose it at cards and give it to boyfriends who beat them up. If all that happens, if you live through it and take care of everybody and keep a little money somehow, then your daughter is disgusted with you."

"Miaow's a kid," Rafferty says.

"What do you think Pim is?" Rose says, just this side of a snap. "And don't say 'Oh, that's different,' because it wouldn't have been, not if you hadn't come along. What do you think Miaow would have been doing at- How old are you, eighteen?"

"Sort of," Pim says.

"What would Miaow have been doing at seventeen or eighteen, do you think?" Rose demands. "Running for office? Look at her, Poke. She even looks a little like Miaow."

Rafferty looks at the girl, and Rose is right. They're both small, brown, and shaped by the distinctive gene pool of the northeast, with rounded features, broad nostrils, and the fine, dark, flyaway hair that Miaow used to part and slick down with water. "A little," he says.

"Miaow is your daughter?" Pim says. "She's prettier than I am."

"It'll change you," Rose continues, as though no one else has spoken. "Now you're a good girl, you're a village girl who's never hurt anybody. Two, three years from now, you'll lie, you'll tell men you love them when you can't stand the sight of them. You'll steal their money when they're in the shower, then tiptoe out of the room. You'll tell your friends to look for them outside the club so you can hide when they come in. You'll drink and smoke and take yaa baa and nobody knows what else. You won't be Pim anymore."

"You haven't changed."

Rose tilts her head back and drains most of the beer in three or four long swallows. "I don't even have my own name," she says. "Now I'm Rose. Before, in my village, my name was Kwan. I came to Bangkok as Kwan, who bathed in the river under a long cloth and washed my hair in rainstorms with all my clothes on. I kept my voice down to be polite. I was a good daughter and granddaughter. I was embarrassed to be so tall. It took about six months before I turned into this person called Rose, who danced nearly naked every night and gave big smiles to men when what she wanted to do was to kick them in the face. I ate yaa baa like candy, and I smoked"-she looks down at the cigarette in her hand-"about as much as I smoke now. I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose-you didn't know that, did you, Poke?" She hasn't turned to face him. "He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it's a good name and it means 'spirit,' and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong." She laughs, rough as a cough. "The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile. Every dick every night, every guy who wants to go bareback, maybe he's the one who'll give it to you. So you visit the temple and you pray and you say no when they don't want to wear one, and they slap you around until you say yes, and then you go to the temple and pray harder, and you're terrified next time you get tested. Except you learn, when you've been here for a while, that all the tests are negative. Even if you're positive, the tests are negative." She inhales the rest of the cigarette as though she'd like to bite into it and spit it out. "Did you know that, Poke? All the tests are negative. Positive tests are too expensive for the bars."

"I don't think that's true anymore," Rafferty says.

Rose backs across the living room, drinking as she goes, still looking at Pim. When she feels her legs touch the couch, she collapses and tosses the almost-extinct cigarette butt into the ashtray. "True or not, who cares? You." She tosses the word toward Pim as if it were a rock. "You want to spend your life worrying about condoms? You want to ride up in elevators with guys who might decide to break your fingers? You want to learn to pee on guys who need that? You want to do three-ways and four-ways and five-ways and whatever way the guy wants? You want guys to put it in your butt?"

There's a moment of dumbfounded silence, and Pim bursts into tears. She puts her right hand on her injured shoulder and cradles it, then reaches down and grabs her ankle and just lets the sobs come. They're big, gulping sobs, minor-key foghorn tones, sobs that lift her back and lets it drop, and they come from someplace very deep.

Rafferty says, "Great. You've cheered her right up."

"I wasn't trying to cheer her up," Rose snaps. "I was trying to- I was trying to… save her. Save her, okay? Is that too dramatic for you? Does all the talk make you uncomfortable? You want to leave it unspoken? What do you want to believe? You want to believe that I lived on the tips from colas? That I turned down guys for all those years, just waiting for you to come in off the street?"

"It's a little late for that," Rafferty says, and he feels an immediate and blood-hot wash of shame.

A door bangs against a wall, and a moment later Miaow stalks into the room. Without looking at either Rose or Rafferty, she goes to Pim and rests a hand on the back of the girl's neck. "Come on," she says. "You can cry in my room. She'll leave you alone in there."

Pim gets up, looking even younger than Miaow, and Miaow puts an arm around her and leads her out of the room. This time she closes the door quietly.

Rafferty stays where he is, listening to the silence reestablish itself in the room. Rose is as still as a mannequin for the space of nine or ten breaths, and then she pulls back her arm and slings the beer bottle, end over end, spewing beer, at the sliding glass door to the balcony. The bottle explodes in a skyrocket of brown sparkles, and the pane of glass in the door cracks from corner to corner. By the time Rafferty has torn his eyes from the damage, Rose is already up and heading for the bedroom, her spine as straight as a bullet's path, her hands balled into fists. She shoves the door aside with her shoulder and kicks it closed behind her. IT TAKES PIM a few minutes to stop crying, or at least to lower the volume to the point at which it's not audible from Miaow's room. There's a single crash of something hard and heavy in the room Rafferty and Rose share. Then there's nothing at all, just the steady sigh of the air conditioner, and the city dark and sparkling behind the crack in the glass door, turning the jagged seam into a long, narrow prism, shining with color like a frozen rainbow.

It seems like a good idea to clean up the broken glass. This is an area in which he can be helpful. He can think of no reason that anyone would get angry at him for cleaning up the broken glass.

He goes into the kitchen and pulls open the door of the narrow pantry, which is next to the stove, tugging it gently to keep the catch from making its snapped-finger sound and opening it only partway so it won't bang against the handle of the oven.

A loud noise right now would, he thinks, break him in pieces.

The dustpan and the broom are exactly where they should be. There's a sort of smugness to them, an implicit criticism of everyone and everything else in an apartment where nothing seems to be where, or the way, it should be. He picks up the items carefully, as if they were made of hundred-year-old crystal, and carries them into the living room, making a detour to the door to slip into his shoes. The shards of brown bottle glass cover a roughly semicircular area of carpet in a radius of about two feet. Some larger pieces glitter even farther away. The neck, widening at its base into a jagged crown, would make a formidable weapon. He picks it up. If he'd broken the soda bottle on John's head, he would have been holding something as lethal as this. It's easy to imagine bringing it up, the neck clenched firmly in his fist, to cut long, deep, bleeding scores in John's flesh. Parallel, like rows in a field, spouting blood wherever the furrow intersected an artery.

On the whole, he decides, looking down at his knuckles, gone white on the bottle's neck, he's glad the soda bottle remained intact. He'd been angry enough to cut John, cut him badly. Instead all he'd done was inflict temporary damage on the man's mucous membranes. And he wasn't happy with himself even about that.

He isn't really happy with anyone.

A bag. He needs a paper bag now, doesn't he? There's not much fucking point, he thinks-and then goes back and deletes the "fucking"-there's not much point in picking up a few hundred pieces of broken glass without having something to put them in.

He gets up, hearing his knees pop in a way they didn't used to, and returns to the kitchen. The paper supermarket bags are neatly folded into thirds and pressed flat, then jammed by Rose into the space between the side of the stove and the counter, in such high numbers that they've reached the kind of superdensity that Rafferty associates with collapsed stars. It takes him three or four minutes to tease one out, and when he's worked the corner free and is tugging it, it promptly tears off in his hand. The rest of the bag remains, pristine and unmolested, in the cramp of brown paper between the oven and the counter.

He crouches there, the kitchen floor vaguely tacky under the soles of his shoes, and looks down at the little corner of bag in his hand. Then he gets up, deliberately drops the tiny piece of paper on the floor, and grinds it beneath his shoe. That chore done, he puts both hands against the edge of the stove and shoves it with every ounce of strength he possesses, into the side of the pantry.

The stove has only a couple of inches to travel, but it accelerates surprisingly and creates a rewarding wham when it hits the pantry wall. The smell of old grease wafts invisibly upward. Lazily, as if in slow motion, the bags that had been jammed between the counter and the side of the stove fan out like a hand in gin rummy and then spill onto the kitchen floor in a slippery cascade. Some of them manage to slide all the way to the counter on the room's far side.

Isn't gin rummy an alcoholic-sounding game? Rafferty thinks as he uses the soles of his shoes to stretch, mark, and tear as many of the bags as possible. Gin and rum, all in one game-and a game that kids play, at that. Have to look into the origins of the name sometime. This is precisely the kind of thing the Oxford English Dictionary is for, not that he has an Oxford English Dictionary. What he has, at the moment at least, is an apartment that is easy to visualize as a map, complete with borders, heavily defended borders, dividing the independent nations that fight over the space: Roseland, Miaowistan, and the Kingdom of Poke. Crossing these borders involves negotiation, checkpoints, and body-cavity searches. And even then you might be turned away.

"I didn't sign on for this," he says aloud.

He picks up the single bag that's survived his shoes-obviously the sturdiest bag of all, and it has to be sturdy to hold this much broken glass without shredding, so he can tell Rose, assuming he ever speaks to her again, that he was testing the bags to find the one that would keep them safe from the shards. Safe from the shards, safe from the shards. He totes the shard-safe bag into the living room, where he sees the broom and dustpan right where he put them a year or two ago, and he sets the bag down, sweeps some glass into the dustpan, tries three times to sweep in one larger piece that doesn't want to be swept, bends down to shove it into the dustpan, and…

… slices the pad of his thumb.

In one white-hot movement, he drops the piece of glass, drops the dustpan, grabs his thumb and squeezes it, all the while straightening his knees and his back, coming up until he's standing and whirling in a circle against the pain, swinging the bleeding thumb fast enough to create a zigzag Jackson Pollock lighting strike of blood on the white wall beside the door. He steps sideways and bangs his bandaged elbow against the wall to his left, and the next thing he knows, he's kicking the dustpan as hard as he can and it's sailing across the room straight and true, shedding splinters of glass as it gains altitude, until it bangs up against the door to the bedroom. It flips over and spills all the glass he's swept up, directly onto the carpet in front of the bedroom door.

A moment later the door opens, and Rose stands there. She sees the blood on the wall, sees him folded over in pain, and steps into the room at the precise instant he realizes that she's barefoot.

"No!" he shouts.

Rose says "Uuuuiiiii, uuuuiiiii!" and grabs her right foot. She looks at the bottom of the foot, and she's bleeding.

Rafferty feels something swell inside him, low in his belly, and then there's some kind of pressure forcing its way up, and suddenly he's laughing. The laughter reaches down and brings more laughter with it, and he's standing there, still bent over, injured elbow tight against his side, squeezing his sliced thumb, simultaneously laughing like a fool and blinking away tears as Rose, her foot still in her hand, glares down at the hazardous litter on the carpet in front of her, clenches her teeth, bends the knee of the leg she's standing on, and jumps over the spill of glass. She lands on one leg, windmills her free arm to stay up, and manages to remain standing, and then she's laughing, too, and Rafferty moves crablike, still bent forward, across the room to her, and he puts his unbandaged arm around her, pointing the bleeding thumb away to keep the blood off her clothes, and the two of them lean against each other and laugh until Rose starts to cry.

Very slowly, very carefully, Rafferty maneuvers her to the couch, Rose taking small, backward, one-legged hops, and gets her seated. He kneels in front of her and cups her face in his hands, painting a bright brushstroke of blood across her cheek, as she closes her eyes and weeps, bringing her own hands up to hold his wrists. He leans toward her until their foreheads are touching, his hands still cradling her face. She makes an enormous snuffling sound, and he laughs again, although his own cheeks are cool and wet. Rose's sobbing turns into a laugh and then a hiccup, and Rafferty says, "Look at us."

Rose pulls back enough to pass her arm over her cheeks and sees the blood she's smeared on her arm. "We're both bleeding."

Rafferty says, "Are we ever."

He feels a presence and turns to his left to see Miaow and Pim standing there, staring at them, eyes wide and faces wide open.

Rose snuffles again and then wipes her nose on the back of her hand. "Okay," she says. "It's time."

Pim backs away from the crying, laughing people on the couch. She puts a hand behind her for the doorknob and says, "Thank you for a nice afternoon."

"You might as well stay," Rose says. "You need to hear this as much as they do."

"But I have to-"

Rose sails over her with a single breath. "No you don't. You need to know about this. You must be hungry, right? Well, Poke's going to bandage his thumb and bring me a bandage for my foot, and then he's going down to get us all some takeout from the street vendors. You and Miaow can go down with him to help him carry it all. Get a lot, because this is going to take a long time."

Miaow looks suspicious. "What're you going to do?"

Rose reaches over and brushes Rafferty's hair off his forehead, then raises her hand as though she's going to swat him. "Be Poke's wife," she says. "Wipe blood off walls. Sweep glass."