The fourth watcher

“You know,” she says with a hint of impatience, “all this started long before you were born, before Frank went home and met your mother. He had a life in China, he wasn’t just a tourist. If anything was an afterthought, it was you.”

“That’s not exactly the point, is it? You don’t start a family when you’ve already got one. In America it’s called bigamy.”

“In China it’s called common sense. He had no way of knowing he’d ever be back. The Communists took the whole country, older brother. A lot of lives were changed. It looked permanent, and not just to Frank. What was he supposed to do, go into a monastery? Although,” she adds, “I’ve always thought Frank would make a good monk. He’s got the discipline and the patience for it. And the focus.”

“A Jesuit, maybe.”

“Exactly, although I’m sure you don’t mean it the same way I do.”

“What’s he running away from?”

“You’d know already if you hadn’t ridden your stupid horse out of that restaurant.”

“Whatever it was,” Rafferty says, “it followed him.”

“No it didn’t,” she says with considerable force. “Nothing follows Frank unless he lets it.” She turns and pokes him square in the chest. “You brought it here.”

25

Ugliest Mole in China

'Colonel Chu,” Frank says. He looks at Leung, who does something economical with his shoulders that might be a shrug. “Ugliest mole in China.”

“He and three others,” Rafferty says. “Thai.”

“Local help,” Frank says. “Nobodies,” He sits on the edge of the bed in a backpackers’ hotel on Khao San Road. Ming Li had changed tuk-tuks in Mah Boon Krong and redirected them to Bangkok’s budget travelers’ district, her eyes on the road behind them every yard of the way. Now Rafferty sits on the opposite bed, beside Ming Li. Leung squats peasant style, smoking a cigarette in a corner near the door.

Frank wears a rumpled shirt that he obviously slept in, and his thin hair has a bad case of bed head. “Arnold Prettyman,” he says disgustedly. “Why didn’t you just hire a skywriter?”

“You knew Arnold?”

“Knew about him. Arnold was a stumblebum. Now he’s a dead stumblebum.” He looks older and frailer in the morning light. When he glances up at Poke, Poke sees the little burst of gold in the brown iris of his left eye, something that had fascinated him as a kid and that he had forgotten completely. “Christ,” Frank grumbles, “even when he was working, Arnold was usually the flare.”

“The flare?” Rafferty glances at Ming Li, who has her eyes fastened disapprovingly on the wrinkles in Frank’s shirt.

“The distress signal, the guy you give the wrong info to, so he can leak it to make people look somewhere else while you do whatever you have to do. Of course, the flare can’t be smart enough to figure out the dope is wrong, because if the other guys decide to come after him and get persuasive, he has to believe it. That’s what Arnold was really good at, believing nonsense. For that, he was highly qualified. He was unevolved, one foot in the Mesozoic and the other in his mouth. You were probably okay until you called him. We came here to warn you just in case, because you’re my kid, but now you’ve really screwed yourself. And worse than that. Not just yourself.”

“You, for example,” Rafferty says.

Frank pulverizes a peanut he has been holding and lets the whole thing drop. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I don’t.” The sharpness in Rafferty’s voice surprises even him.

“No, of course not. You’re the aggrieved party, the blameless victim.”

“Actually,” Rafferty says, “that’s my mother. I’m just fine.”

Frank reaches out to the small table between the bed and picks up the bowl of unshelled peanuts he has been dipping into. Beside it is a saucer with several shelled nuts on it. “Fine? You’re an open wound.”

“Like a lot of egotists, you overestimate your impact.”

“I wish that were true,” Frank says. “But it’s not.” He drops a shell to the floor and adds a nut to the pile on the saucer, then holds the saucer out with exaggerated politeness. “Peanut?”

Poke gives him the politeness right back. “No, thanks, but it’s so kind of you to offer.”

“You’re being a horse’s ass.” Frank’s eyes wander away from Poke and gradually settle on Leung. “Colonel Chu. Well, that’s not a surprise.”

“I assume he’s got some weight,” Rafferty says.

“Oh, yes,” Frank says. “The colonel has some weight.”

“If he’s here,” Leung says, “there are others.”

Frank makes the face of someone who’s just realized he put salt in his coffee. “Not a chance. He can’t let anyone know about the box. That’s why he’s using locals.”

“Who went after my family,” Rafferty says, and suddenly he is furious. “Picking my lock in the middle of the night. Going into my apartment with their guns drawn. Where my wife is. Where my child is.”

“I called you,” Frank says. “If I hadn’t been watching. .”

Rafferty feels his face grow hot. “Gee, and I forgot to bring your fucking medal. Just once, just for practice, why don’t you try seeing something from somebody else’s perspective? Just for the sake of your tiny, mummified little soul. You pop up, materialize out of whatever dimension you normally hang around in, and barge into my life- which is finally on the verge of being the life I want, the life I’ve worked for- dragging a bunch of unwholesome shit, like Marley’s chains. You were dead, remember? And you’ve been gone longer than I knew you. How do I know who you are by now? So I tried to find out. Poor old Arnold was the litmus paper, and guess what? He turned blue.” Poke gets up, just to move. “Whoever you are, you failed the acid test. You said you were on the run. I didn’t want to know why, I didn’t want to spend a few chatty hours catching up with you. I just wish to Christ you’d run in a different direction.”

“I knew this was going to be difficult,” Frank says.

Ming Li says, “Poke. You have to know.”

He stops pacing. He feels light, empty, as though there is a vacuum at his center.

“For God’s sake, sit down,” Frank says. “Trust me for three minutes. Stretch yourself. It’s good for your character. Have a fucking peanut.” He holds out the dish.

Rafferty takes a seat on the other bed. Ming Li sighs. The bed is hard and narrow, the room furnished with nothing small enough to steal. The guesthouse in which Frank has gone to ground is a recessed, nondescript building announced by a sign that originally said home away from home guest house before someone changed one letter with Magic Marker to make it read homo away from home. A statistically improbable number of teenage boys had been lounging on the couches in the lobby when Rafferty and Ming Li came in. A couple of them had been wearing lipstick.

“I already know some of it,” Rafferty says. “Courtesy of my chat with that woman-I mean, Wang, Ming Li’s mother-all those years ago.”

“Back further.” Frank makes a waving gesture, paddling time toward the past. “I told you I stole her. What I didn’t tell you, because you walked out, was that I stole more than that.” He reaches behind him and plumps a pillow, settles it against his lower back, and leans against the wall. “This is ancient history, but it’s pertinent.” He sighs and glances up at Ming Li.

“I was young,” Frank says. “Hell, I was just a kid. You ever do anything stupid, Poke? And of course I was in love, which, for all the nice songs about it, doesn’t really raise the old IQ. You have no idea how beautiful Wang was. Or maybe you do. Look at Ming Li-that’s where she gets it. She was so beautiful it made me ache, and she was lost. More lost than I ever thought anyone could be. Just a kid, and about to be punctured by some fat toad, and then she’d have eight, ten years of getting screwed front, back, and sideways seven or eight times a day before