“I don’t blame you. We’ve all got a lot to think about these days. Anyway, maybe Arthit will come back and you’ll hear us talking, so-Oh, I don’t know why I should keep secrets from you. He asked me to see if I could get a list of the cheap hotels our patrolmen were being sent to watch, and I got it and made a sort of chart of them. Just to make it easier for him to visualize them.”
“Sent to watch,” Pim says.
“Well, sure. The people who want Poke figure he’s staying in some cheap place, probably a short-time hotel, where he won’t have to show identification. So they’re dispatching cops to keep an eye on places in a few areas where a foreigner wouldn’t draw too much attention. Arthit wanted to know which hotels and where. Maybe so he could tell Poke. I don’t know, and I didn’t ask.”
She gathers the wet towels and balls them up. “Where?”
“The Nana area,” he says. Then, watching her closely, he says, “Around Khao San.”
Pim’s hands tighten on the ball of dripping towels.
“And around Soi Cowboy.”
Pim says, “Ahh,” and gets up.
“So he asked me to come by and show him this stuff this morning. I guess he forgot.”
“He was busy,” Pim says, dropping the towels into the wastebasket. “He had something on his mind.”
“Like you do,” he says, smiling again. “Like all of us, with this situation.” He looks at his watch, which is made of gold. “I don’t know what to do. He hasn’t called back. Maybe I should just go to the station.”
“You can leave the charts with me.”
“No, I’d better take them so he can look at them. Otherwise he won’t see them until tonight, and he said it was important.” He looks at the table. “I think everything’s fine except the sugar bowl.”
“I’ll fix that …” she says, but he’s already leaving. She follows him down the hall to the front door.
Over his shoulder he says, “You should be more careful. Don’t leave doors open like that. I could have been anyone.”
“I needed … I mean, the house needed to be aired out.”
“Well, it’s nice and airy now.” He stops at the door and looks down at her. He’s wearing some sort of aftershave that smells like mint and lavender put together. “You’ll remember to tell him, won’t you? I mean, if he calls or you talk to him before I do?”
“I promise,” Pim says.
He grins and holds up a crooked little finger. It takes her a moment, but she crooks hers through it, and they both give a little yank to seal the promise.
“About?” he asks, their fingers still linked.
“Those hotels.”
“Good,” he says. He lets go of her hand and touches her shoulder, and his smile broadens. “And where?”
She smiles back at him and says, “Khao San.”
12
Nui was right, Poke thinks. Go after the most dangerous one first.
He begins with what he knows. Helen Eckersley. Cheyenne.
A trip to Pantip Plaza, Bangkok’s hub for stolen, cloned, and bootlegged hardware and software, buys him a lightly used, somewhat stripped-down netbook-total weight about four pounds-and an extra battery. It costs him a little less than twenty thousand baht, making a substantial hole in his reserves. Even with the money he pulled out of the ATMs on that last night, he’s getting down to small money.
He’ll have to do something about that.
But first he spends a little more on a second throwaway phone and some minutes to put into it. Now he’s got two phones that can’t be traced to him, and one of them is about to be used for something dangerous. After he’s done it, he won’t be able to use the phone to call anyone he cares about.
Before he can make the call, he needs information. He takes the computer into a Coffee World, feeling oddly exposed because all the shops in the chain resemble one another, and he’s well known in the two he frequents near his apartment. He half expects to be called by name. A large cup of coffee and a hundred baht buy him the right to jack the netbook into one of their LAN connections for a lot longer than he hopes he’ll need to.
It takes him about two minutes to get a phone number in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for Helen Eckersley.
It’s a little after 8:00 P.M. in Bangkok, making it seven in the morning in Wyoming. Good enough, he figures; if he wakes her, he wakes her. He punches in the number on the new phone, closes the lid of the computer, steps onto the sidewalk, and presses SEND. The connection takes so long that he pops beads of sweat, envisioning airless rooms where men listen on headphones, but eventually a phone begins to ring on the other end: once, twice-five times in all. And then he hears a woman, a smoker’s deep voice curlicued by some kind of accent.
He gives it a moment’s thought and then breaks her heart. Feeling as though two electronic exposures-the telephone and the Internet-are enough for the moment, he goes back in, unplugs, pays his bills, and hurries off down the sidewalk.
This is the time of day he feels safest. The daylight is gone, and the neon is on, and the sidewalks are jammed. Tonight, for the first time, he’ll return to the hotel room he left in the morning. He’s never felt sufficiently secure until now to risk going to the same place twice.
It’s the passage of time, he thinks. He’s become old news.
He turns down a
And although he doesn’t want to contact him, he does in fact know someone with money.
It’s still too early, so he goes into a bookstore, buys a paperback, and takes it into a small neighborhood restaurant, where he dares to sit in the window. He doesn’t draw a glance. For the first time since he went down on that street under the dying man’s weight, he loses himself in someone else’s story. By the time he comes out, it’s ten o’clock, which makes it 10:00 A.M. in Virginia.
The phone informs him it’s got about forty dollars’ worth of time on it. He dials a number he never thought he’d call.
“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” a female voice says.
Rafferty says, “Excuse me?”
“It’s the marriage liturgy,” the voice says, “and if
“Ming Li,” Rafferty says. “Are you engaged?”
“Older brother,” she says, and the delight in her voice raises his spirits. “Oh, I
“Afraid not. Why are you fixated on the marriage liturgy?”
“It’s so civilized. It’s such a good idea. We should hear it every time somebody suggests something life- changing. Someone neutral should have to step forward and say, ‘Before this stupid girl makes up her mind to buy that car or kiss that hulking boy, does anyone know better? If so, speak now or forever hold your peace.’ ”
“Are you regretting something?”
“Why am I here?” she asks in a modulated wail. “I’m
“Everybody has to die somewhere.”
“Don’t sprain your sympathizer.”
He finds himself grinning at the phone. He hadn’t even known he had a half-Chinese half sister until his father
