Arthit looks at the sitting man’s face.
Forty minutes later Rafferty says, “I hope this is interesting. I was sitting at home, just sort of wishing for a merciful death.”
Arthit, heading through the dining room toward the kitchen, says, “It’s interesting. Sit down and you’ll find out.”
Rafferty chooses the armchair he’s chosen for years and sits carefully, trying to keep his head from rolling off his neck. His throat is dry, and his tongue feels like it has a seat cover on it. The morning light, even through the thick clouds, is bright enough to make noise.
He has to stand again almost immediately as Arthit comes back with Pim in tow. She’s carrying a fancy coffee cup, thin enough to let him see the coffee through the porcelain. She hands it to him without meeting his eyes or saying hello and trudges away, shuffling her feet like someone who’s polishing the floor with her socks. Arthit returns Poke’s questioning glance with a man-to-man combination of wide eyes and shrugged shoulders that means,
Rafferty starts to sit again, but no such luck. Into the room comes a very trim and, he thinks, quite beautiful woman about Arthit’s age.
She’s wearing a dark blue blouse, possibly silk, with loose half sleeves that bare elegant forearms and an exquisite pair of hands. The blouse hangs over white linen slacks, only slightly wrinkled despite the damp of the day. She has a short chop of thick, willful hair, brushed back to reveal a porcelain forehead and large, rounded eyes, a brown that goes golden in the sunlight streaming through the windows.
“This is Anna,” Arthit says, and Rafferty hears a note in his friend’s voice that he hasn’t heard in months and months.
He greets Anna in Thai, and she makes a fluid, practiced gesture, first almost touching her fingertips to her lips and then to her ear and ending with her upraised palm facing him. Arthit says, “Anna doesn’t hear or speak. But she can read your lips.”
Rafferty says, “In English?” and at the last moment diverts the question to her instead of Arthit.
Anna gives him a broad smile, and Arthit says, “In Serbo-Croatian, probably.”
Still smiling, Anna sits on the couch and tucks her legs under her.
Arthit takes the other end of the couch and clears his throat. “It’s because Anna reads lips that we’re all here.”
Rafferty hears a floorboard creak in the dining room. Since Arthit is still looking at him, he makes a small movement with his head toward the noise.
“Poke,” Arthit says, a bit stagily. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen and get Pim? She lives here, too, and she ought to hear this.”
“Let me have a gulp of coffee first,” Rafferty says. He takes a long sip, replaces the cup on the saucer with a clatter, and yawns loudly to give Pim the chance to duck back into the kitchen. He glimpses the look that passes between Arthit and the woman-Anna, her nickname is Anna-as he leaves the living room. The look was shared amusement, and it’s a look that, Rafferty thinks, usually takes a while to develop.
“Hey, Pim,” he says. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with an empty cup-a chipped mug, not one of the good ones-in front of her. He goes to the coffeemaker and hoists the carafe. “Want some more?”
She shakes her head.
He carries it over anyway, glances down at the cup, and says, “Well, you can’t have more if you haven’t had any.” He pours her half a cup. “It’s good. Come on, it’ll get your heart beating.”
He’s been speaking English, and he knows she understands only bits of it. From the look on her face, she’s not even trying.
“Can I have more?” He holds up his empty cup.
“Can have what you want,” she says.
She’s such a puffy, hapless little thing, short, plump-faced, uncertain. When he’d first met her, she was trying to work the sidewalk on Sukhumwit Soi 7, and he’d dragged her home to meet Rose. He and Rose had thought they were doing a favor for both her and Arthit when they suggested she come to help him with the house, but looking at her now, he’s not sure he was right.
“Why don’t you come into the living room for a minute?”
“I’m not really a servant,” she says in Thai. “I can stay here if I want.”
“It’s not an order. I think Arthit just wants to make sure you know what’s happening.”
She blows out a gallon of air in a way that reminds him she isn’t really that much older than Miaow and gets up, mug in hand.
“Wait,” he says. He turns to the cupboards, which he had helped Arthit clean and organize in the aftermath of Noi’s death, and pulls out one of the porcelain cups, with saucer. It takes him only a few seconds to fill it with fresh coffee and hold out his hand for the mug. She hesitates for a moment, and then they swap, and Rafferty follows her into the living room.
Arthit gets up as they enter and ushers her to the second armchair. Anna’s eyes follow Pim as she crosses the room. When they’re all seated and Anna’s gaze has dropped to her lap, Rafferty leans back and sees, for an instant, the same tableau but with different people: Rose and himself in the armchairs, Arthit and Noi on the couch. Seeing Anna in Noi’s place, he feels a sharp, almost-physical twinge of loss, an emotional cramp.
Since someone has to say something, he toasts Pim with his cup and says, “This is great coffee.”
“You’ve met Anna before, I think,” Arthit said. “At the temple. For Noi’s …”
“I remember,” Rafferty says, just to break in on Arthit’s pause.
“She and Noi grew up together,” Arthit says. “Now, once in a while, she reads lips for the police when there’s video evidence that doesn’t have sound or where the voices aren’t audible.”
“Ahh,” Rafferty says. “The footage that didn’t make the news.”
“You already know about this?” Arthit asks. “That there’s official interest, I mean?” Anna watches Arthit’s lips and then turns to Rafferty for his answer.
“They hauled me in last night, about nine o’clock.”
“Who?”
“A Major Shen.”
“Not
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know him personally, but my impression is that he’s the worst possible news.”
“I’ve got worse,” Rafferty says. “He grilled me in a crappy little room with one of those mirrors in it, and on the other side of the mirror were a couple of guys from my own country-you know, the land of the free. One of them was our pal Elson.”
Anna nods and holds up her free hand. With the other she’s writing on a small pad. She tears off a sheet and hands it to Arthit.
“She says that makes sense. Shen works with the Americans.”
“On what?” Rafferty asks Anna, who’s writing again.
“The situation in the south,” Arthit reads from her pad.
“Sure,” Rafferty says. “He was all over me about Indonesia and the Philippines, like I was some sort of courier for militant Islam.”
Arthit is nodding before Rafferty finishes speaking. “It’s just a matter of time before one of the big jihadists is caught here, either down south or in Bangkok,” Arthit says. “We’ve got a big Arab population in Bangkok and a lot of native Muslim discontent down there.”
“Who’s Shen with? I didn’t recognize the uniform.”
“It hasn’t been worn in public much. It’s a little operatic if you ask me. Listen, I know him for only one reason, and that’s because he was given permission to take pretty much anyone he wanted from any department he wanted. And he chose knuckle-draggers, the kind of guys you’d take into the street if you thought you might have to fire into a crowd.”
Anna is writing again, but this time she holds the pad up for everyone to see. It says, in English,
