The fourth watcher

“Wake him up.”

“You’re on your cell,” she says. “Nothing worth waking him up for should be said on a cell. What time is it?”

“Eight-twenty. And it’s important to you and important to me.”

“Tell me where you are.”

Why not? It’s a little late to worry about any threat from Frank. He tells her.

“Twenty minutes,” Ming Li says. Then she hangs up.

It’s too early for his first planned stop of the day. The man he is going to see, whom he interviewed when he was in the first stages of researching his abandoned book, works seven days a week, but he won’t be open for business until eleven or so. Since Rafferty’s in front of a keyboard, he decides he’ll take the most optimistic outlook: Everything will work out, and he still has to earn a living. He pulls his notebook from his pocket, opens Word, and begins to key in his notes about the spies.

He’s surprised at how easily it comes. He transcribes a few words from the notebook, and then new impressions and new observations crowd in on him, and he weaves them into his notes. What had been the outline of a story begins to become the story itself, complete with the details that bring a place, a person, to life. Tired as he is, the words slip out with little resistance, and gradually the picture assembles itself, sentence by sentence, before his eyes. The trails these men took to come here, the peculiar mixture of openness and secrecy that characterizes their conversations, the eyes, different colors and different shapes, but always in motion.

Arnold Prettyman’s eyes, open and unseeing.

His burned hands wired to the chair.

“Not very vigilant,” Ming Li says, and he jumps two inches straight up from his seat. Ming Li steps back and says, “My, my. Maybe you shouldn’t have any more coffee, older brother.”

“I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours,” Rafferty says. “If it weren’t for coffee, I’d be speaking to you from the floor.”

She pulls up the stool next to him. She is immaculate in a free-hanging white T-shirt and loose-fitting black slacks. Every man in the coffeehouse stares at her. “What’s that?” she says, leaning forward to read the screen.

“It’s money,” he says. He highlights the text, hits “copy,” drops it into an e-mail to himself, and sends it off. Then he gets up and says, “Let’s go.”

“I want some coffee.”

He looks through the window at the developing day. “Get it to go.”

In the next twenty minutes, Ming Li leads him through a tangle of turnarounds, drop-backs, blind alleys, stop-and-watch points, and random reversals that would disorient a homing pigeon. Even Rafferty doesn’t know where they are, and he says so.

“Six weeks with city maps before we came,” Ming Li says. “I must have spent a hundred hours on Google Earth.” She turns into a clothing store and positions herself at the window, behind the mannequins.

“Frank’s drill,” she says, watching the street. She finishes the coffee, slurping it a bit.

“Frank’s drill,” he repeats, looking over her shoulder. Nothing catches his eye. “Did Frank’s drill include teaching you to throw major-league heat?”

Her eyes continue to search the sidewalks. “Major what?”

“Pitching. Like you did with the lychee seeds.”

“Ahh,” Ming Li says. “Day in and day out.” Without a glance back at him, she leaves the shop. Rafferty follows like a good little puppy.

“Why?”

“Why what?” They are side by side in the morning sun, and Ming Li leads them across the street. To most people it would look like a simple maneuver to get into the shade, but Rafferty knows that it pulls followers out of position, if there aren’t many of them.

“Why did he teach you to pitch?”

She looks at him and then past him. Satisfied that no one is there who shouldn’t be, she says, “He wanted me to be good at it.”

Rafferty experiences a pang of something so much like jealousy that it would be silly to call it anything else. “He never taught me squat.”

“Poor baby,” Ming Li says without a hint of sympathy.

“Unless you count sitting silently around the house. He taught me all there is to know about that. My father the end table.”

“Maybe when you were a kid, he wasn’t homesick,” she says.

Rafferty burps some of his newly acquired coffee. “He may not have been homesick, but he read every fucking word about China he could get his hands on.”

“China wasn’t home, older brother. China was my mother. She’s pretty much a nightmare in some ways, but he loves her. He loves yours, too. But he couldn’t bring her with him, could he? Had to leave her back there, with the rest of America. But baseball, baseball we could get. He picked it up on the shortwave at first, and then on satellite TV. Everything in our lives stopped for the World Series. Soon as I was big enough to get my fingers on the seams of the ball, he started to teach me. Hung an old tire in the courtyard of the house we shared with nine other families and had me throw through it, and I mean for hours. Every couple of weeks, I’d move a step back. I’m good to about fifty feet, but I haven’t got the lift for longer.”

“Huh,” Rafferty says from the middle of a cloud of feelings. They swarm around him like mosquitoes, except he can’t swat them away.

“When I was pitching, I was America,” she says. “And I was you.”

The words distract him so much he stumbles off the curb. “How did you feel about that?”

“I liked it. It made me feel important. It was getting the ball through the tire that was hard.”

Rafferty realizes he can see it all: the dusty courtyard, the perspiring girl, the inner tube in the tree. And, behind her, his father. Her father. A life he never imagined. “Where is Frank?”

“He’s where we’re going. He did talk about you, you know. He was-he is-proud of you.” The two of them turn into a small street that Rafferty, after a moment, recognizes as Soi Convent, now known more for its restaurants and coffeehouses than for the religious retreat responsible for its name. “He’s got all your books.”

Rafferty says, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Too bad. And he’s kept up with you in Bangkok.”

This strikes a nerve. “Just exactly how?”

“Frank knows everybody.” She steps off the curb into the morning traffic and raises a hand. “Too many people, in fact. That’s part of the problem.” A tuk-tuk swerves to the curb, its driver gaping at Ming Li as though he’s never seen a woman before, and Rafferty thinks she must get a lot of that. “Mah Boon Krong,” she says, naming a neighborhood Rafferty rarely frequents. She slides over on the seat. “Get in.”

He does, and she gathers her loose black trousers around her.

“What about Leung?” Rafferty asks.

“One thing I’ve learned,” she says, “is never to worry about Leung.”

The driver lurches into traffic, both eyes on Ming Li in the rearview mirror.

“And does Leung worry about you?” He catches the driver’s eyes in the mirror and says, in Thai, “Look at the road.”

“More than he needs to. Frank’s a good teacher.”

The courtyard, the dust, the girl, the woman upstairs. All real, moment to moment, day after day, as real as his life in Lancaster. He forces his mind to the present. “It’s not all baseball, huh?”

“Baseball and other games. Frank thinks four, five moves out.”

“So where is he?”

“I’m not sure thinking ahead like that is something you can learn,” Ming Li says, ignoring the question. “You have to keep all the pieces in your head all the time, be able to see the whole board in six or eight possible configurations. Either you have it or you don’t. Do you play chess?”

Rafferty’s turn to ignore the question. “I suppose he taught you.”