“Well, knowing all of it, why did you let things get so out of hand at the card table? Why didn’t you defuse it earlier?”
“The right question,” Arthit says thickly, “is, why didn’t I give a fuck?”
Rafferty waits.
Arthit slumps sideways, his cheek pressed against the passenger window. “Between us,” he says.
“Fine.”
“I mean it. Not even Rose.”
This stops Rafferty for a moment. There’s nothing he keeps from Rose. He looks at his friend’s drained, crumpled face and says, “Not even Rose.”
“Noi needs…pills to sleep,” Arthit says. The words seem to require physical effort. “The pain’s worse and worse. It keeps her up. I can hear her breathing. So the doctor, the new one, he gives her sleeping pills. Strong ones. She’s been getting them for more than three months.”
Noi has been Arthit’s wife for seventeen years. Her nervous system is being ravaged by multiple sclerosis. In the last few months, her decline has been brutally swift. She is a burning match. Arthit has been reduced to the role of helpless bystander.
“Do they work?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Arthit says.
“Why not?”
Arthit opens the glove compartment and snaps it shut again. “Every night she goes into the bathroom and she brushes her teeth, and then I listen as she fills a glass with water and shakes a pill out of the bottle, and then she comes to bed. Just like the doctor told her to. And I lie there and listen to her breathe, hear the catch in her breath, and I know she’s awake.” He opens the little compartment door again and leaves it hanging, the dim splash of light from inside it bringing his thighs and belly out of the darkness. “And this morning I went into the kitchen to make her some pancakes, as a surprise. She loves pancakes.”
Rafferty feels a tremor of dread but says, “Okay.”
“And in the tin of flour, a couple of inches down, I found one of those plastic bags that’s got the little zipper along the top, and it was full of pills. There were eighty-one of them, Poke.”
Rafferty says, “Oh?” Then he says, “Ohhhh.”
Arthit puts both hands on his friend’s arm. “Eighty-one of them,” he says. “Hidden from me.”
7
The phone in the Silk Room rings at 11:17 P.M.
The man in the big bed is awake immediately. Late-night phone calls are so common that his wife sleeps in the Teak Room, more than thirty meters down the hallway. It is a very big house.
“Yes.” He switches on the bedside lamp, and the pale silk walls of the room appear. He listens for a moment, until something he hears brings him up to a full sitting position. His forehead wrinkles and then smooths immediately, automatically erasing the display of concern even though there’s no one to see it. “Seriously?
He peels back the blankets and gets up, a lithe, slender, balding man in his early fifties, whose face retains the fine bone structure that had made so many well-bred hearts flutter when he was younger, the bone structure that landed him the problem daughter of one of Thailand ’s oldest families, now sleeping down the hall. He wears silk pajamas. “Was he drunk? He must have been drunk.”
A desk, the work of some English craftsman who’s been dead for three centuries, gleams between the heavily curtained front windows. On one corner is a silver tray holding a decanter of water and a heavy, deeply cut crystal glass. The man cradles the phone between ear and shoulder and uses both hands to pour, being careful not to splash any water onto the wood. He picks up the water and sips. “No,” he says, “not at all. You were right to call.” He puts the glass back on the tray and picks up a pen. “Spell it?” He listens and then writes,
“Let me think about that for a second.” His underlings call him “Four-Step” behind his back, because of his insistence on thinking things through four and sometimes even five steps in advance. He closes his eyes briefly, his finger making tiny circles on the wooden surface of the desk.
His eyes open. “Good idea,” he says. “Two in English and two in Thai. All morning papers, and one of them should be the
8
The children who joined the boy in the alley have eaten their fill at a roadside soup stand, and the boy has given each of them a small amount of money for the needs of the following day. The little ones are already curled up on old blankets spread over the dirt floor close to the damp wooden walls, since they go to sleep earliest. The older kids take the middle of the room, with the biggest ones in front, near the door, next to lengths of two-by-four with nails driven through them at one end.
Just in case.
The boy steps outside into the misting rain, pushing the shack’s wooden door closed behind him. The mud, thick beneath his flip-flops, slopes down toward the edge of the river, which is low at this season. A cloud of mosquitoes orbit him, but he waves them off and makes his way up to the boulevard, where he flags down a motorcycle taxi.
There’s a one-in-three chance that he’s guessed right about where the village girl with the baby will end up. She came out of Wichat’s building, and Wichat maintains three holding pens, or at least three the boy knows about. There could be more.
But his luck is good. He is sheltered in a doorway when another moto-taxi bounces over the ruts and stops in front of the empty-looking building across the street. She is on the backseat, the baby at her chest and a white plastic bag dangling from her free hand. He retreats into the darkness as she climbs off and takes her first real look at her destination.
Partway across the stretch of mud, Da stops.
Six or seven steps distant, seen through the gaping doorway, the hall is ghost-dark. To Da’s heightened senses, the building teems with spirits. It is roofed but unfinished, surrounded by an expanse of mud behind a rusted chain-link fence. Pitting its surface are dark, empty windows that look to Da like missing teeth. Patches of plaster have peeled from the walls, exposing sagging layers of crude, handmade mud bricks. The place smells of piss and abandonment.
Da takes two more steps, peering into the hall that yawns in front of her. There is enough city light reflecting off the low clouds to dilute the blackness of the hall into a kind of darkness in suspension, like a glass of water into which a writing brush has been dipped repeatedly. A long pool of black rainwater has collected against the left wall. Dimly visible at the hall’s far end is a staircase.
The baby sleeps, heavy and loose-limbed, in her left arm, curled against her chest. The baby’s blanket stinks of ammonia. A heavy plastic shopping bag cuts into the fingers of her right hand. Behind her she can hear the mechanical heartbeat of the motorcycle taxi that brought her, as the driver waits to make sure she’s in the right place before he abandons her.
