they tell him if he doesn’t leave Thailand the next day, they’ll lock him up forever. They pay me, maybe thirty, forty dollars, depending on how much the man had. Sometimes more. They keep most of it.”
“The man doesn’t get arrested?”
“No, but he’s out of Thailand. And the kids can eat.”
They walk as Da considers it. There’s not much traffic yet, and the lane is almost peaceful. “Who thought of it?”
“I did.”
“How did you find the cops?”
He gives her a quick glance. “You mean crooked ones?”
“Yes.”
He laughs. “What’s hard is to find straight ones.”
Small bright plastic chairs, red and blue, are drawn up on the sidewalk, flanking a sloping table covered in a burnt-orange oilcloth. A frilly, smooth-trunked tree provides shade. Over a charcoal fire burning in a black metal drum at the curb, a wok smokes and sputters, and four people are already slurping out of faded plastic bowls. The smell of the food makes Da realize she’s starving, and that Peep must be, too. “I’ve got to get something for Peep,” she says.
“After you eat. One thing you learn on the street is to take care of yourself first. You’re no good to anyone unless you’re strong.” He waves at the woman beside the fire, broad and brown and sturdy, who gives him a bright good-morning smile and starts throwing things into the wok without asking what he wants.
“Your girlfriend?” she shouts, stirring in some chopped garlic and a handful of cilantro.
Da is surprised to see Boo blush.
“Look how shy,” the woman says, laughing. She pours liquid down the sides of the wok, and fragrant steam billows up as the others at the table, three men and a woman, laugh, too. “Such a handsome boy, if he’d only get his hair cut. Honey,” she says to Da, “cut it while he’s asleep if you have to.”
“I just need to comb it,” Boo says. His face is scarlet.
“You couldn’t comb it with a tractor,” the woman says. This time Da laughs with everyone else, and after a moment Boo smiles, too.
“I have very fresh chicken this morning,” the woman says. “An hour ago it was a customer.”
“Two of everything,” Boo says. “Except jokes.”
“You should always start the day laughing.” The woman is throwing things into the wok with both hands. “If you don’t, you’ll end it crying, my mama used to say.” She looks at Da again and says, “Isn’t she pretty?”
There’s unanimous agreement among the customers, and it’s Da’s turn to blush.
Da sits there, in the shade, smelling the food, watching the woman’s sure, quick hands and listening to the flow of chatter and laughter, and suddenly the entire scene blurs and ripples, and she is surprised to realize that she has to wipe her eyes.
“Don’t cry, honey,” the woman calls out. “He’s not
“I’m sorry,” Da says, drying her cheeks on her T-shirt. “I just felt like I was back home.”
With another ninety minutes on tape in the apartment downstairs, and with Rose back in bed and Miaow reading in her room, Rafferty has time on his hands. When he came home the previous evening, he’d been able to spot two of the people watching the apartment. He’d guess that there’s one more, one assigned to each of them. The third one had undoubtedly been behind Rafferty, following him, and probably peeled off when he saw Rafferty was going home, probably called the others for confirmation that Rafferty had actually arrived and entered the building. There’s not that much traffic on Rafferty’s soi. No point in the follower drawing attention to himself.
Probably two shifts, possibly even three, since apparently money is no object. Not much use trying to memorize all the faces when they’ll change in a few hours. He figures that they’ve chosen their surveillance spots and that by and large they’ll stick to them, so he’ll keep an eye on those places. He needs to find spot number three.
And soon. His best guess is that he can continue for another day, two or three at most, to do a convincing imitation of someone who thinks he has a book to write. If they’re unconvinced, there’s nothing to say they won’t grab either Rose or Miaow as a way of holding his feet to the fire.
To get whatever it is they really want.
How would Ton be working the surveillance? The watchers are in the street. The microphones are in the ceiling. Presumably someone is listening in real time, and the two groups, the watchers and the listeners, are communicating. When the information from inside the apartment indicates that the family won’t be going anywhere, all but one of the watchers are probably encouraged to leave their positions. No sense drawing attention to themselves needlessly. They’d be somewhere nearby, most likely someplace crowded out on Silom, with cell phones. When the listeners hear that someone is going to leave the building, all of them would get a call and move into their spots.
Maybe the best thing to do is to separate them. The three of them go out and head in a different direction, put some distance between them, and then…
And then…what? If one member of the family disappears, Ton’s guys will probably kill the other two. Rafferty has to take Weecherat’s murder as a message. Rose and Miaow need to vanish at the same time, and then Rafferty needs to become invisible, too.
Information overload, he thinks. There’s a lot of information going to Ton’s men, between the sounds coming in over the microphones and what the watchers are seeing. They’ll be comfortable, maybe a little lax. All those eyes, all those ears. He needs to exploit that. Create a disconnect of some kind, a contradiction between what they hear and what they see, and use the confusion to make two people vanish in plain sight. Up until now he’s been focused on figuring out how to make them think that Rose and Miaow are still in the apartment for a day or so after they’ve left it. He’s been trusting himself to come up with the way to
Putting second things first.
He looks at his watch: 9:25. Time to imitate a writer. He puts the yellow list on the table and starts to dial numbers. He starts with the cop and then moves to the gangster.
Their bellies are full. Peep is clean and freshly diapered, engrossed in a bottle of formula from Foodland. Da and Boo sit on the riverbank in the shade, watching the river slide by.
“I don’t know what I can do for you,” Da says. “I’m probably too old to help you with those cops. Peep’s too young. We’re just two more mouths for you to feed. And you did all that-I mean, Kep and all of it-for me.”
Boo watches a gleaming white cruiser speed upstream. The reddish brown water parts before it, sluicing up over the sides, all the way up to the big red letters that say RIVER QUEEN.
“Rich people,” he says. “That’s from the Queen Hotel. Rich
Da says, “In Ayutthaya?”
“No, Da,” Boo says with exaggerated patience, “not in Ayutthaya. At the Queen Hotel.”
“How would I know? I’ve never even been in a hotel.”
“Three hundred, four hundred dollars,” he says. “Some of the rooms cost more than a thousand dollars.”
Da looks over at him. It sounds like a lot of money. “How many baht?”
“More than thirty thousand.”
“Thirty thousand? My whole village didn’t have thirty thousand baht.”
“The people on that boat could buy your village with what’s in their pockets. They wouldn’t even have to go to an ATM. But they wouldn’t want your village.” The boat is well upstream by now, and Da can make out some of the men and women gathered at the back of it. Most of them wear white clothes, and many of them look fat. “But you know what some of them would want?”
“What?”
“Peep.”
Da says, “Oh,” and she sees it all. Poor mothers, rich people, and the currency a baby. She holds Peep a little more snugly.
