The fourth watcher

The bank teller reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a fat envelope. The man takes it, gives it an experimental heft, and doesn’t seem to like what he feels. Cologne rolls off him in heavy waves, a scent many flowers died to create. The tight eyes come up to the bank teller’s face, flat as burned matches. “How much?”

“One hundred eighty thousand.”

“Not enough.” His Thai is strongly accented. He slaps the envelope against his hand in disgust.

“Slow day,” the bank teller says. His own voice sounds thick and distant.

The man pulls another envelope from beneath his belt and hands it to the teller. Like the first, the new envelope is heavy manila, with the date scrawled across it. “Have a better day Monday,” he says. “Or maybe no one will answer the phone next time.”

6

A Perfume from About a Thousand Years Ago

'It’s a perfume from about a thousand years ago,” Rafferty says. “It’s called White Shoulders, and the man’s squirt gun was full of it. I’m lucky he didn’t get me in the eyes. Hand me the bowl, okay?”

“It smells terrible,” Miaow says. She passes him the bowl, wipes pink frosting from her chin with a brown finger, glances at the finger, and puts it in her mouth.

“Terrible like what?” Rafferty says without looking up from what he’s doing. “Terrible doesn’t tell me anything. If you want to be a writer, Miaow, you need to be specific.” The cake won’t come out of the pan. He turns the pan upside down over the yellow platter and gives it a discreet whack with his knuckles.

Miaow had startled him two weeks earlier by announcing she was going to be a writer. Like him, she said. He’d had to swallow a sudden lump in his throat before he could say anything.

“It’s sweet terrible,” she says. “Terrible like. .” Concentration plows a tiny furrow across Miaow’s flawless eight-year-old nose. “Like if a flower threw up.”

Rafferty raises his eyebrows. “Pretty good.” He burps the cake pan again. The cake doesn’t budge.

Miaow’s eyes are on the cake pan. “White Shoulders is a dumb name.”

“I didn’t name it, Miaow.”

She dredges a thumb through the frosting bowl and licks the clot of pink. “Why would they call it White Shoulders?”

“I don’t know.” He takes the spatula from the bowl and runs it again around the edge of the cake pan, exactly as the magazine recipe directs. He finds the maneuver considerably more difficult than it sounds. “Maybe somebody thought it was sexy.”

“And you?” Rose asks from the living room. She is curled like a dark odalisque on Rafferty’s white leather hassock, which she has pushed in front of the sliding glass door to catch the light. She is in an indolent race with time, trying to finish painting her toenails before the sun dips below the jagged horizon of the Bangkok skyline. Night comes fast here. Her lustrous black hair has been pinned up, baring a slender neck the color of the gathering dusk, with a throb of pink beneath. Her jeans have been traded for a pair of shorts, baring the legs that literally made Rafferty gasp the first time he saw them, when she stepped onstage in the bar. The white shirt hangs in immaculate folds; in a phenomenon that has mystified Rafferty since he met her, Rose’s clothes never wrinkle. She has stuck the ever-present cigarette between her toes to free both hands, and the smoke curls like the ghosts of snakes around her hair. Her eyes slide sideways to his. “You,” she repeats. “Poke Rafferty. Do you think white shoulders are sexy?”

“Actually,” Rafferty says, his gaze sliding easily down the familiar curve of her back, “I’m pretty firmly in the brown-shoulders column.”

“Eeeek,” Rose says languidly, fanning her toes. “A sex tourist.”

At the sound of the word “sex,” Miaow’s eyes swing to Rose and then up at Rafferty, who is looking straight at her.

“Not in front of the c-h-i-l-d,” Rafferty says to Rose, still watching Miaow.

Miaow drops her gaze to the mixing bowl and scoops out more frosting. “W-h-y n-o-t?” she asks.

“Because, Miaow,” Rafferty says, “in spite of the fact that you think you know everything in the world, you are approximately eight years old and there are still things adults only talk to adults about.” The “approximately” is necessary. None of them actually knows how old she is, but they settled on eight soon after she left the sidewalks and moved into his apartment. For all he knows, she’s a tall seven or a short nine.

“Like your dumb book,” she says. “You won’t talk about that either.”

“The word ‘dumb’ is getting a lot of work,” Rafferty says mildly. “Dumb name for a perfume, dumb book. And have you read it, Miaow?”

“You haven’t written it yet.” She turns toward the living room. “He can’t get the cake out of the pan,” she sings to Rose in Thai.

“This is just a complete surprise,” Rose replies, also in Thai. She is inserting white cotton pads between brown toes and giving her total attention to the task. She takes the cigarette from between her toes, glances at it critically, squeezes that final ghastly puff from the filter, and stubs it into submission in the swimming-pool-size ashtray on the carpet.

Rafferty twists the pan like a Mobius loop. “Of course I can get it out,” he says. “Miaow just expects me to behave like a man and put my fist through the pan or jump up and down on it. Instead I’m getting in touch with my feminine side. Look how patient I am.” He shakes the pan over the platter. “Get out of there, you bugger.”

“How about this?” Miaow says. “Let’s play I’m going to write a story about you. And you have to tell me stuff so I can write it. Why did the man shoot you? And why did he use perfume instead of water?”

“He shot me to make a point,” Rafferty says, hearing the irritation in his voice. “And, by the way, we have a name for people who criticize books they haven’t read.”

“What?” Miaow demands.

“We call them Republicans,” Rafferty says, watching his knuckles go white on the rim of the pan.

Miaow shakes her head. “I don’t know what that means.”

“And they say laughter has no borders.” Rafferty tosses a glance across the room at Rose, who is bent lovingly over her foot. He would not be surprised to see her lean down and lick it, and he briefly hopes that she will. A spill of ebony hair has slipped loose, exploded by the failing sun into a riot of dark color, the way a rainbow might shine against the night sky. “Actually, the cake is just a touch stuck,” he admits.

She does not look up. “Did you remember the butter?”

“The butter?” Rafferty says, and Miaow says, in English, “Oh, brother.” He can actually hear her roll her eyes.

“To coat the pan,” Rose says to her foot. “You were supposed to rub a stick of butter around inside the-”

“Seemed like a lot of fat,” Rafferty says. Rose’s head comes up and Miaow’s comes around. Their expressions are identical, the reluctant anxiety of someone who is beginning to doubt the intelligence of a new pet. “I used honey,” he says.

“Honey,” the females say together, and Rose adds, “Why didn’t you just use cement?”

“Let me,” Miaow says, taking the pan and bumping him with surprising force for a child so small. She puts her thumbs in the center of the pan’s bottom and looks from the surface of the cake-slightly burned, Rafferty suddenly notices-up to Rafferty. Her eyes narrow in calculation. “If I can get it out, you have to tell us why you smell so bad. About the man with the squirt gun. And you have to tell Rose, too, as a present for her happybirthday.”

“Deal,” Rafferty says, watching her handle the pan. “By the way, ‘happy’ and ‘birthday’ are two words, not one.” The words somehow arrived in Thailand permanently joined, linguistic Siamese twins in Siam.

“That’s nice,” Miaow says. “What about the man with the gun?”

“Do you want to hear this, Birthday Girl? ” Rafferty asks.