“How about we forget the money and I come over and redecorate your apartment?”
Kosit looks around the room with great interest. “Sure. I have a cute little French maid’s outfit, all black and white with ruffles. I haven’t been able to talk anyone into wearing it.”
Rafferty says, “Will you take a check?”
In the elevator Rafferty says, “Seen much of Arthit?”
“Nobody has. He’s like the Ghost of the Station. You see him around corners once in a while, but by the time you get there, he’s disappeared.”
Rafferty sags against the wall. “Hell.”
“What’s wrong?” Kosit asks. “You two are close. I tried to ask him what was going on, and he practically bit my nose off.”
“Problems of some kind. He won’t talk to me either.”
“Must be bad, then. You guys are like a pair of gloves.”
“It’s bad. Listen, do whatever you can, okay? Even if he acts like you’re imposing and he’d be happy if you fell off the edge of the earth, just sort of take his temperature every so often. He may need help any time, and you know him. He’d rather die than ask for it.”
“I know. I mean,
The elevator stops. Before the doors open, Rafferty says, “Remember, don’t say anything inside.”
Kosit nods and claps a hand to his mouth, and Rafferty crosses the hall and opens the door.
Rose and Miaow are in the living room. A heavy, unmistakably toxic chemical odor punches him in the nose. Miaow is sitting on the hassock with a towel over her shoulders and something slick and gleaming-vegetable oil or petroleum jelly, maybe-spread over her forehead and cheeks. She’s as shiny as a potato bug. Rose, who has a mouth full of Q-tips, is wearing rubber gloves and combing something viscous through Miaow’s thick hair, which has been parted even more ruler-straight than usual. His daughter doesn’t meet his eyes, but she registers Kosit behind him and slams her lids shut as though that could make both men disappear.
Rose says around the Q-tips, “Don’t distract me. Whatever you want in the kitchen, you know how to find it.”
“Yes, I love you, too. I think it’s time for a beer.” He gives Kosit raised eyebrows and gets a nod, so Rafferty goes into the kitchen, the bullet holes in the linoleum and the cabinet looking as big as lunar craters, and pops the refrigerator door. “Which do I want?” he asks aloud. “Singha,” he says, holding up one finger, “or Tiger?” He holds up another.
Kosit gives him two fingers back, so Rafferty pulls a Singha for himself and a Tiger for Kosit. “And does my brusque little honey want anything?”
“Half an hour without being asked what I want.”
“This is wonderful,” Rafferty says, uncapping the beers. “We’ve reached the point in our relationship where we no longer have to be careful of each other’s feelings. We’re finally finished with all that tiptoeing around the real issues, all those secret resentments.” He hands Kosit his bottle and takes a haul off his own. “Our long national nightmare is over at last.”
Rose pulls a couple of Q-tips from her mouth and uses them to wipe carefully at Miaow’s hairline and then, with the other end, the curl of her ear. “Go away. Go in the other room. This is girl business.”
“If you want me-”
“I won’t,” Rose says.
“-you know where to find me. Just hovering aimlessly at the end of an invisible thread, putting my entire life on hold while I wait to see how I can be of service.”
Miaow says, “
“I guess it’s unanimous. Okay,” he says to Kosit, “the bedroom it is.”
The two of them sit on the bed and drink. Rafferty slides open the headboard and grabs a wad of baht. He counts out seven one-thousand-baht notes and hands them to Kosit. Kosit pulls out the receipt again and puts it on the bed, smoothing it with the side of his hand, to show that it’s actually for sixty-eight hundred. Then he fishes around in his pockets until he comes out with a sweat-damp clump of smaller bills, which he pries apart with blunt, tobacco-yellow fingers. He hands Rafferty a salad of twenties and fifties and a couple of coins. While Rafferty drops the money uncounted into the compartment in the headboard, Kosit probes his shirt pocket and pulls out a crumpled pack of Marlboros, undoubtedly Korean street fakes, and wiggles his eyebrows in interrogative mode. Rafferty reaches down to the floor on Rose’s side of the bed and comes up with the swimming-pool-size ashtray she uses at night. Kosit looks at it so gratefully that Rafferty thinks he might take a bite out of it, but instead he shakes a bent cigarette free and lights up. His face assumes an expression of such relief that Rafferty toys with the idea of lighting one himself, but he muscles it aside. The two men sit in companionable silence in the middle of a miasma of smoke, sipping their beers, while feminine mysteries unfold unwitnessed in the living room.
Finally Kosit stubs out the filter and puts the ashtray back on the floor. He dips a hand into the bag and begins to pull out the items he has bought: two four-packs of long-life AA batteries, a handful of microcassettes, the overpriced connectors, and a glossy box decorated with a photo of a small recorder that Rafferty recognizes, with a pang, as identical to the one Elora Weecherat had used. He takes the box from Kosit, opens it, and shakes the contents free onto the bed. Yes, it’s exactly the same. He picks it up, expecting it somehow to be much heavier than it is, and slides open the compartment at the back, where the batteries go. Kosit picks up a thin black cord with a little square power brick at the outlet end and shows Rafferty where the male end of the jack slips into the recorder. He uses his index finger to flick a package of batteries and leans to whisper in Rafferty’s ear. “Insurance,” he says. It’s not much louder than a breath. “In case there’s a power outage.”
Rafferty nods, but he can’t take his eyes off the tape recorder. Weecherat’s daughter was seven, she had said. It’s a magical age.
Whatever it takes, whatever he has to do, he’s going to make Captain Teeth pay.
On the trip to the abandoned apartment house, Da and Peep share the van with the woman and baby they had ridden with in the morning. There is no sign of the third woman. Before Kep gets into the front seat, the woman with the dark baby says, “They’re taking her somewhere else. They always move a woman when they change her baby.”
“Why?”
“They don’t want people talking too much.”
Kep climbs in, slams the door, and starts the van without so much as a glance at Da. But three or four times during the long ride, she feels his eyes on her in the rearview mirror. When she looks up to meet his gaze, he holds hers until it becomes necessary for him to pay attention to some kind of static on the road. And then, a few minutes later, his eyes are on her again, weighing her, appraising her. He has never looked at her like this before, and it brings a warm, faintly dirty-feeling prickle to her neck and cheeks, as though she has not washed in several days.
She stops checking the mirror.
When he pulls to a stop in the dirt yard, the first day’s routine is repeated. As the women get out of the van, Kep holds out a heavy envelope to each of them. Each of the women empties into the envelope with her name on it all the money she has taken in, and Kep adds the bills he has seized during the day.
He adds no bills to Da’s envelope.
“Wait,” she says as he licks the flap.
Kep says, “Shut up.”
“You took eighteen hundred-”
Kep gives her a flat gaze. He looks sleepy. “I don’t remember that. Anybody see you give it to me?” He runs his thumbs over the moistened flap, sealing the envelope. Then he pulls the envelope back and brings his hand around, slapping her across the face with it.
It’s not a particularly forceful slap, but all the coins in the envelope have slid to the end that is moving fastest, and the hard weight of the jumble of coins strikes her cheekbone with enough force to jar her and bring tears to her eyes. Blinking to clear her vision, she takes an inadvertent step back, almost a stumble, and comes up against the hot, unyielding surface of the van. Kep follows her, his nose practically pressed to hers, and the sleepy look has been replaced by something dark and tightly focused, and Da recognizes it, with a sharp, sinking feeling, as
