into an asset. By the time she was eight, she was following people. At ten she was running low-level cons and forging signatures. At twelve she was helping to plan their escape, carrying in her head secrets that would have killed her father, her mother, and herself if someone had wormed them out of her. He’d worked with her, Frank had, until she had a coat of solid brass and her English was accent-free and she was fluent in Mandarin
And Frank, self-exiled in Asia, had talked to her endlessly about his lost son. About Poke, whose mother he’d abandoned to flee to China when Poke was seventeen. When Frank and Ming Li had emerged from China for an unexpected and unwanted reunion a few years back, Poke had been surprised and even touched to learn how much she knew about him, this girl whose existence he’d never even suspected. He’d softened slightly toward his father, begun to think there might be a relationship there after all. And then Poke’s father had pulled yet another con.
Even her body language, as she works the phone, is efficient, precise, persuasive. Instead of her usual teenage sit-on-the-lungs posture, she’s perched bolt upright, her spine an inch or two from the back of the chair. Her free hand pats at her hair, as though she’s moments away from getting up and going into a meeting. There’s a half smile on her face; she obviously knows that people can hear a smile even if they don’t realize it.
Her eyebrows go up and her eyes widen in misleading candor as she asks a question. He turns back to the window, not sure how he feels about any of this. She’s seventeen, no matter what her passport says, and her father has turned her into a professional, a con artist and a premature cynic who finds the entirety of American civilization wanting. Miaow, at twelve or thirteen, has reservoirs of scorn, but as someone who was abandoned on the sidewalk at the age of two or three, she’s earned it.
Ming Li is the only sister he’s ever had. What has his miserable father done to her?
Reflected in the window, he sees her stand up, and he opens his mouth wide to clear his face of whatever expression he’d been wearing and turns to face her.
She says, “Helen Eckersley was Asian.”
20
There are two places he could go, but it’s 10:00 P.M. already, and the laundry will be closed. So at least he’s spared that. For the moment.
With some misgivings, then, he calls Vladimir and tells him to come get his money. And thinks of a way to put Ming Li to work.
He’d told Vladimir to go to the closed Asia Books on Sukhumvit and then call him. A thumb on the phone had cut short Vladimir’s protest that he could be trusted with the actual destination. He’d hauled Ming Li out onto the sidewalk, the guys in Coffee World drooping in disappointment, and grabbed a cab for Sukhumvit. The drizzle had lifted, but the streets still shone like obsidian and the air smelled almost fresh, or at least wet.
According to the driver’s radio, water from the rising river is being diverted into several canals, and residents of the areas intersected by those canals are being advised to get their belongings-and, presumably, their asses-to higher ground. The cabbie says to Ming Li, in Thai, “It’s going to be bad.”
“There’s already flooding around the Temple of Dawn,” Rafferty says in Thai.
“My house is near there,” the driver says. “My wife’s taken the kids to her parents. Where do you live?”
“Silom.”
“Never happen,” the driver says. “Silom is a rich area.”
“Yes, but does the water know that?”
Ming Li is ignoring the chatter. She seems entranced to see Bangkok again. Her nose is practically pressed to the taxi’s window.
“The guy,” Rafferty says to her in English. “He’s six-two or so, getting a little paunchy, with a long face, a black mustache, and eyebrows that almost meet over his nose. And a cleft in his chin deep enough to be a national park. Head shaped like a bullet, black hair-”
“Got it,” she says. Her breath fogs the window.
“Practically oozes melancholy.”
“I said I’ve got it.”
“He looks the way a Gypsy violin sounds.”
“Tall, narrow-faced, dark hair, cleft chin, unibrow, mustache, depressive. Looks Russian, in other words.” There’s a lot of patience in her tone.
“Oh, right, I forgot. He’s Russian.”
“I
“Good. You just stand a few stores down and wait for me to call.”
“I’m seeing a lot of girls on this street,” she says.
“Oh, good Lord,” he says, remembering Pim.
“Well, if
“They’ll survive the encounter,” he says.
He lets her out a few blocks from the store, tells her to be careful, and gets a snort in return. The cab takes him another quarter of a mile to a small
“I am here,” Vladimir says. “You are not.”
“Okay. Face Sukhumvit so the store is at your back. Got it?”
“This is not difficult.”
“Turn left and start walking. Call me in two blocks.”
“You are not trusting me.”
“Of course I trust you. We’re friends.” He disconnects, and the phone rings instantly.
“He’s towing somebody,” Ming Li says.
“Does he know it?”
“Yes. The guy was about twenty feet past me, so I was in between them, right? Fighting off prospective husbands right and left.”
“Come on, come on.”
“So he put the phone away, turned and looked past me, and gave the other guy what I’d call a ‘significant glance.’ You know, melodramatic countries shouldn’t even try to spy. Russians all think they’re in an opera.”
Rafferty signals the waiter and makes a scribbling motion in the air. “Can you tamp down the adrenaline a little? So they’re both coming toward me, right?”
“I don’t know where you are, do I? Sorry, it’s just that it’s so much fun to be doing this again.”
“Vladimir turned away from you, and he and the other one are going in that direction.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’ll lead you to me, unless I move. Describe the other one.”
“Mmmm. That’s not easy. He looks like every Caucasian gene in the planet was put into a blender and-”
“Never mind. I know who it is.” He hands the waiter some money and waves off a halfhearted offer of change. “Okay. Where are you?”
“Crossing a big, insane intersection with a street coming in at a diagonal and-yikes! — buses going in the wrong direction in the lane nearest the curb.”
