“That’s a very generous serving of compassion,” Arthit says. “Definitely something to remember.”
32
I hope you know what a big favor this is,” grumbles the man behind the desk. Through the floor-to-ceiling window with the desk positioned in its center, Rafferty sees the silvered windows of the office tower across the street.
“And I hope you know how much I appreciate it,” Rafferty says to Wichat with the smallest smile he can manage. “The people who want this book written feel you might have a special perspective on Pan.”
“I was around,” Wichat says. His shoulders are hunched and high, and it looks protective. “I was just a foot soldier then, but I was around.”
“That’s not what I hear. I hear you were already on the way up.”
Wichat shakes his head. “The big guy then was Chai. He was generous with his men. He took care of me. I did what he needed done, and he took care of me.” Wichat tilts the chair back, dangerously close to the plate glass behind him.
“Doesn’t that scare you? It’s, what, twenty-eight stories down?”
Wichat says, “Nothing scares me.”
“Well, lucky you. Did anything scare Pan?”
“If it did, he didn’t show it. He could have been pissing his pants, but he looked like something carved into that wall of his. Nothing showed except what he wanted to show. Had a way of bringing down the corners of his mouth so hard they almost touched. Scared the shit out of people.”
“You knew him when he made the move, right? The move to the massage parlors.”
“The Mound of Venus,” Wichat says lightly, as though he’s been asked an unexpectedly easy question. “Sure.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
Wichat picks up a battered pack of cigarettes and tweezes one out between his first and second fingers. He puts it in his mouth and picks up a gold lighter. “Trying to quit,” he says.
“Yeah, well, lighting one is a surefire method.”
“I don’t light as many as I used to,” Wichat says, blowing a plume of smoke across the desk. “Don’t smoke them so far down either.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
“He didn’t need money. How do I know my name isn’t going to be all over your book?”
“If it is, you can kill me.”
“Funny,” Wichat says dourly. “No names, got it?”
“Got it.”
“I wouldn’t tell you shit if you didn’t have so much fucking weight behind you.”
“As I said, I appreciate it. Where’d he get-”
“I told you,” Wichat snaps. “He already had some. And he didn’t need as much as you’d probably think. He got the first Mound pretty much free, just the old gun-to-the-head negotiation. The guy who owned it had made the wrong decisions about who to be friends with. It would have been a small funeral. So he signed it over to Pan for maybe enough baht to buy a week’s worth of chewing gum, and Pan fixed the place up.”
“And then?”
“And then he made a bunch of money from the first Mound and opened the others. Business, right? Make profit and reinvest it. Selling pad thai, selling pussy. Same-same, you know?”
“What else?”
Wichat reaches up and passes a palm over the surface of his oily hair. Then he makes a palm print on the desk’s smooth surface and looks down at it as though evaluating its worth as evidence. “What else, what else.” He drags on the cigarette again and examines it, obviously thinking about what he’s going to say next. “Two things,” he says. “You didn’t hear this from me, but there were two things.” He glares at the half-smoked cigarette, stubs it out, and drops it in the ashtray. “Hard not to pick these things up and light them later, you know? Especially when you were poor once.”
“Get a jar of water,” Rafferty says. “Drop them into it.”
Wichat’s eyes widen slightly. His complexion is rough and pitted. He must have had terrible acne as a kid. Acne plus poverty; if Rafferty didn’t know the man was a killer and perhaps worse, he might even feel sorry for him.
“Hang on,” Wichat says. He picks up his phone and punches a single number. “Get me a jar of water and bring it in here. No, not a glass. If I wanted a glass, I would have asked for a glass. A jar, and a coaster to go under it. A little more than half full. No lid.” He hangs up. To Rafferty he says, “Good idea.”
“You were about to tell me two things.”
“Bunch of half-smoked cigarettes floating around, that’s going to stink.”
“Yeah. And?”
“Good idea.” His eyes drop to the surface of the desk, scanning it as though he’s looking for an objection to what he’s about to do. “Two things,” he says. “First, the Mounds of Venus weren’t the whole story, okay? He also owned a bunch of handcuff houses, you know handcuff houses?”
“Pretend I don’t.”
“Houses where the girls aren’t…eager, you know? Where they’re handcuffed to the bed. Some guys
“Are you sure of this?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. This is dangerous stuff I’m telling you. I don’t want to know it myself. You think I’d make it up?”
“Pan acts like prostitutes are his fallen sisters.”
“Pan’s one of the world’s great liars.” Wichat brings both hands up, scrubbing the air to erase the remark. “But the Thai girls, the ones who worked in the Mounds? He took good care of them. They got paid good, and they got time off and everything. I even heard he takes care of some girls who got sick. But that’s just Thais, you understand? Just Isaan. The Burmese, he treated them like shit.”
“And the second thing?”
“You seen his hands?”
“You mean the scars?”
“Yeah. You’ve never seen him in a short-sleeved shirt because those burns, they go all the way up to his shoulders and even the front of his chest. It looks like he dived headfirst into a fire to pull something out. He disappeared for a couple of months, and when he came back, he had those scars. He wouldn’t talk about them, but it was only about six months later he got his first factory and started closing down the whorehouses.”
“A fire,” Rafferty says.
“Yeah. He came through some sort of fire, and then he was a different guy.”
“What year?”
“Oh, shit, who knows? He was still closing down the knock shops, so-”
The office door opens, and an exquisite young woman comes in carrying a jar of water. The jar has a label that says “Jif” on it.
“Oh, come on,” Wichat says angrily. “It’s bad enough to have a fucking jar on my desk without the whole world knowing what kind of peanut butter I eat. Peel that thing off.”
“Yes, sir,” the girl says. She wears a pale salmon-colored business-formal office suit, all in silk. Wichat watches her rear end as she goes back out.
“More butt than brains,” Wichat says admiringly.
