business mode, making his boring millions as the guy who knew who to pay and how much, where to get everything from steel wheels to bulk rubber, and doing the occasional bit of freelance wetwork when someone earned it. He’d maintained his connections to the spooks, since he had so many lines out and would be silly not to listen in. Sell information and plausible lies, get richer, get fatter, get laid, shoot someone once in a while, and dream of the old days.
Slow death.
And then those idiots flew into the Twin Towers screaming the name of God, and the President of the United States looked up from the children’s book he was reading to a classroom full of kids and thought, Yikes. Terrorists without uniforms, children with grenades, an enemy without borders. Bad guys hiding in plain sight. Everyday people, people who look like everyone else, serving as double agents or actual combatants. In small, isolated, backward villages. In difficult terrain crisscrossed by secret paths. In countries where people hate us.
So naturally the plan the Pentagon dusted off and revised and presented to the White House was based on the Phoenix Program, and it was accepted while Murphy was in the middle of complicated but boring negotiations for a pottery plant in northeast Thailand. The proceedings barely kept him awake, and his eyes were drooping in a meeting when he got the call he’d never thought would come.
How would he like, the suit had asked, to stick with the business as a cover and go back to doing what he’d been doing before, but also, from time to time, a little more? Or, whenever circumstances permitted, a lot more. Help the Thais deal with the Muhammads in the deep south and keep an eye open in case al-Qaeda or some other suicide club decided it needed to take things out of Camel World and into Bangkok or Yala, way down south, until things cooled off.
Fucking paradise.
The driver says, “What about the gate, sir?”
Murphy looks up. “Oh.” They’ve come to a stop, and the gates designed to keep people like him away from houses like this gleam ice white in the headlights. “Hold on.” He unbuckles the belt wrapped around the briefcase and fingers his way through the wads of documents, toiletries, and stray sticky notes until he finds the remote, which he points through the window at the gates.
“Wow,” the driver says as the house is revealed: two and a half staggered stories with balconies everywhere, useless chimneys for useless fireplaces, a tiled roof gleaming with drizzle, water already standing in some parts of the yard. Manderley in the tropics.
“Do your work, son,” Murphy says, “show up every day, stand tall, skim that graft, and you can buy the place. But you better do it fast if you wanna buy it from
He wants to go back to the airport. Fly someplace with mud and thick greenery and short, smooth, brown women.
The light that shouldn’t be burning. Which will it be tonight? Someone who wants to kill him or someone who can break his heart without even trying?
17
“Right, hurry me up,” Murphy grumbles, getting out of the car before the driver can dart around to open the door. “Beat it,” he says. “The gate closes fast, so don’t hit the brakes when you’re halfway through. I’d tell you to give Shen a kiss for me, but I think I’m too short for him.” He gets a better grip, two-handed, on the gaping briefcase and wrestles it up the curving brick path to the double front door, his spirits and the shoulders of his shirt getting damp in the drizzle. The house rises up in front of him, a monument to bad judgment. Once on the porch, he blows out a long, heavy breath, feeling like a resentenced prisoner. He says, “ ‘Home is the sailor,’ ” and keys in a code on a pad to his right. The lock responds with a discreet snap, and he’s in.
The minute the door closes, he turns to the interior keypad, entering a five-digit code followed by two pushes of the zero key; if someone forgets to do this, as Neeni-the current wife number one-always does when she’s been indulging in her whiskey and cherry-codeine cough-medicine cocktails, sirens wail and the lights all over the place blink on and off. And she stands there, mouth hanging open, trying to remember what to do until somebody comes to help.
She’ll be able to buy a lot of cough syrup when he finally cuts her loose. She’ll probably miss this place when she’s in Mudville, but she’ll have her codeine and her Jack. And
He puts the briefcase on the high-backed chair to the left of the door, a chair that exists for the sole purpose of giving him a place to put the briefcase. During his two years in the house, he has methodically broken or torn up anything anyone else ever put there, and he’s finally got them trained, except for Neeni. Neeni can’t be trained after, say, 4:00 P.M.
On the other hand, she’s not out fucking someone, and Song is.
There’s the light in his train room to think about, so he opens the drawer of an almost-antique marble-topped table and keeps pulling until he can reach beneath it and peel back the surgical tape that holds the knife on the underside. It’s a Buck 119, one he’s had since Vietnam, sharpened so often that the six-inch blade is probably a quarter of an inch narrower than it was new. The heft of it in his hand is deeply familiar. He lays it quietly on the table and leans against the wall to work his boots off. In his socks he moves lightly across the marble-floored entrance hall, the knife in his hand, his arm loose and relaxed. To his left, the living room is pale with the light from the lamps on their automatic timers, and in front of him yawns the formal dining room, now dim but dominated nonetheless by the silhouette of the enormous, six-hundred-pound mahogany table Song had insisted on, back when he still thought she was cute.
To the right, just his side of the stairs to the upper floors, an L-shaped hall leads to the doorway of a small den and then, a few yards later, turns left and ends in the train room. He could go through the dining room and then the kitchen to get to the train room, but those rooms aren’t carpeted, and he’s quieter on the carpet. At the turn in the hallway, an open door lets him look into Neeni’s room. He’d moved her down here eight or ten months ago, after her third fall down the stairs. He can hear her snoring, and something in the shape of her body beneath the covers-always unexpectedly small, given how large she looms in his memory-calls him in. The glass on her bedside table is one-third full of a familiar reddish tan fluid. It’s a big glass.
She’s asleep or, more accurately, passed out, her long black hair fanned across the pillow, her arm bent at the elbow so that her open hand rests on the pillow, only inches from her face. The defenselessness of the slender wrist, the curl of the fingers, touches something deep inside him, and he bends down, studying the face that so drew him once, with its high, angel’s-wing cheekbones and astonishingly fine nose, as perfect and surprising as a baby’s. He’d been on his way home from an all-night drunk in a pig-shit village in Laos the first time he saw her, wearing a Tweety T-shirt and a wraparound skirt, coming out of the temple at about eight in the morning, gleaming in the honey-colored sun like some elegantly articulated, long-vanished exotic preserved in amber, just for him.
He can still see the colors the sunlight discovered in her hair.
She turns her head a few inches toward the light falling through the door, and the loose pouches beneath her eyes and the new softness under her chin become visible. Something heavy settles in Murphy’s chest, some regret that he won’t be able to return her to that village as she was when he took her out of it.
