minutes. I can't imagine why he'd go down there.'
Rafferty can think of several possible reasons, all of them in the raunchier areas of Patong Beach on Phuket. 'I'll check anyway. Have you been to his apartment?'
'I don't have a key.'
She has turned to stare out the window and into the glare of the day, as though she hopes she will see her uncle stroll by.
'Somehow,' Rafferty says, 'I don't think that will be a problem.'
9
Closets are always a good place to start. Claus Ulrich's closet contains a great many linen shirts, every color of the rainbow and a few that got left out in the interest of good taste. The labels proclaim that they are size XXL, ordered from an expensive catalog that pretends to sell clothing to the fashionable world traveler, the kind who puts on a bush jacket to watch the Discovery Channel. Ulrich has arranged the garments to hang bright to dark, a dandy's spectrum. To the right are ten or twelve carefully folded pairs of pleated linen slacks, waist size 46, all beige. Rafferty hears his mother's voice: Beige goes with anything.
But it had not, apparently, gone with Claus Ulrich when he passed through the front door with its surprising assembly of locks. Nor had the open suitcase containing a week's worth of lightweight clothes, stashed in the back of the closet. In writing his travel books, it has never once occurred to Rafferty to remind people not to forget their suitcase.
An hour in the apartment tells Rafferty several things. First, he is the only person to enter it in weeks. The air conditioner has been off all that time, letting the heat and damp attack the rug and drapes and corrupt the foam- rubber cushions of the couch. The smell is as dank as wet leaves, and the heat gives Rafferty a blinding headache.
The headache leads to a second discovery. Looking for an aspirin in the medicine cabinet, he finds a trove of painkillers that, taken cumulatively, could prepare an elephant for surgery. He swallows a couple of ibuprofen the size of jawbreakers and surveys the remainder of Claus Ulrich's pharmacopoeia: prescription drugs for indigestion, powerful antihistamines, and, most interesting of all, three bottles of nitroglycerine tablets, one of them with the protective seal broken. Claus Ulrich has a heart condition and he keeps the emergency remedy right at hand.
So why are the tablets here when Uncle Claus isn't? Rafferty goes back and rifles through the suitcase. An unopened bottle of nitroglycerine, sealed in a Ziploc bag, is folded carefully into a shirt.
In addition to chronic pain, indigestion, allergies, and an erratic heart, Claus Ulrich has both money and taste. It's terrible taste, and there's a lot of it on view. Ulrich's eye runs to the rococo: Wooden objects tend to be heavily gilded and intricately filigreed with curls, gewgaws, and little bulbous tumors that might be either bunches of grapes or the scrotal sac of some alien organism with ten or twelve testicles. The ornate furniture sits beneath walls that are heavily hung with massive gilt-framed mirrors and hand-painted reproductions of dark museum oils. Rafferty looks more closely and sees filmy nymphs of indeterminate sex, cavorting on swings in some sylvan setting that's probably slated for development. Taken tout ensemble, the room has the cosmetic appeal of a fever blister.
The only exceptions-the only things in the place Rafferty would allow within ten feet of his own front door-are two remarkable Khmer apsarases, winged angels, carved in sandstone and maybe eight hundred years old. They're ethereally beautiful, and Rafferty makes a note to talk with a dealer in Cambodian antiquities who works out of the Oriental Hotel.
Not exactly Aussie taste, Rafferty thinks. In his somewhat limited experience, Australian men run more toward dark hardwood and leather: Cut down some trees, skin a few cattle, hammer together a living room set, and hope it doesn't sprout branches. See if your dog tries to herd it.
There are five rooms, four of them twinkling densely with froufrou and bric-a-brac: living room, kitchen, den, and two bedrooms. In the den Rafferty learns that Uncle Claus is au courant with the computer age. A 1.8-gigahertz Dell with a flat-screen monitor sits incongruously on the nineteenth-century desk, a triumph of veneers and inlay. When Rafferty boots the machine, it defaults to Netscape, and a dial-up connection stakes out the screen and demands a password. Stacks of CD-ROM disks, Bangkok counterfeits of popular software programs, are slotted in a four-foot-high plastic storage tower. There's a lot more software, Rafferty thinks, than most people would need: four word-processing programs, two spreadsheets, three graphics suites, several project planners, even two programs for writing screenplays. About fifteen games. He pokes the storage tower with an index finger, making it wobble. Why would anyone need four word-processing programs?
He turns off the computer and gives the desk's single drawer a cursory rummage. Uncle Claus is a neat freak. He bundles business cards with a rubber band, alphabetized by company. Paper clips are segregated by size. Forty or fifty sheets of blank letterhead proclaim something called AT Enterprises, but there is no correspondence. His monthly bills are tied neatly in annual bundles. The bills are moderately interesting: He's spending a fortune on the phone but not calling long distance, so either he's incurably chatty or he spends a lot of time online. There's also an invoice from a company called Bangkok Domestics. Rafferty puts that one in his pocket.
In the far corner of the office stands a filing cabinet, a three-drawer beige rectangle that looks vaguely hangdog at being so proletarian. It is locked, so Rafferty gives it a pass.
Entering the master bedroom, Rafferty feels as though he has stepped into a painting on velvet or a malarial fever dream. Crimson carpets support a canopied bed, gussied up with a tasseled satin spread. Looking around, Rafferty feels that Elvis might appear at any moment, sheathed in an unearthly light. On the table next to the bed is an expensive wristwatch, a gold Vacheron Constantin no thicker than a quarter.
Another thing Rafferty rarely suggests to his readers: Don't forget your watch.
Beside the watch are two photographs. One is of a fat man with thinning hair combed forward in a sort of Bill Haley spit curl above the apprehensive expression of a man who is the last in the room to get a joke. He has a pale mustache trimmed too short over full, sensual lips that look oddly naked. The other is of a young girl, whom Rafferty recognizes as a young and even unhappier version of Clarissa. Rafferty takes the portrait of Uncle Claus to send to Arthit.
The second, and smaller, bedroom breaks the mold. Tucked away at the rear of the flat and lacking an air conditioner, it contains nothing but an unpainted wooden dresser and a narrow bed, just a thin mattress atop an iron frame. The gray concrete slab of the floor is bare and looks recently scrubbed. The grit of a powdered cleanser scrapes beneath his shoes. Rafferty is willing to bet that this was the room that housed the oddly named Doughnut.
In addition to its spartan simplicity, it is different from the rest of the flat in another way: It has been completely emptied and then scoured. Not one trace of its former occupant remains. So if Uncle Claus and his wonderful new maid left together, only Doughnut knew she was going.
10
Never heard of him,' Leon Hofstedler says.
'Oh, come on, Leon.' Rafferty shamelessly signals for the Expat Bar's ageless barmaid, whom the regulars call Toots, to top up Leon's vast stein. 'You're the living map of expat Bangkok. You know everybody.'
'Nice of you to say so, too,' Leon says comfortably, watching the foam rise. 'But this is one German I don't know.'
Rafferty holds up the photo, but Hofstedler's eyes slide over it without recognition. 'He's not German, he's just got a German name. He's an Aussie.'
'Claus the Aussie?' Hofstedler packs the words with irony leaden enough to deflect gamma rays. He is playing
