'What happened to him?' Rafferty asks.
'He told me last night he went to Phuket.' Her eyes come up to Rafferty's, as if assessing the impact of what she is about to say. 'Phuket is full of boys.'
It's not Pattaya, Rafferty knows, but it's bad enough. 'What brought him back to Bangkok? The wave?'
'He won't tell me,' Miaow says. 'But he said it was worse than the wave.'
Rose gets up and crowds onto the couch beside Miaow and wraps her in dark, slender arms. Rafferty wants to hug her himself. She could have stopped long minutes ago, with the rescue from the man in the car. She could have left the boy a hero. She didn't have to talk about the drugs. He knows what she wants, and she knows that every word she speaks makes it harder for him to say yes.
Miaow gently disengages herself and takes Rafferty's hand in her right and Rose's in her left. 'After it happened, Boo ran back to Bangkok. He's too old to beg now. He sleeps in the street. He says he hasn't smoked any yaa baa in a long time.' She stops, breathing heavily, as though she's just run up the stairs. She wraps her fingers around Rafferty's thumb, gripping hard. 'I want him to stay with us.'
'Oh, Miaow,' Rafferty says, although he knew it was coming.
'He can sleep in my room,' Miaow says, talking faster. Her hands are tight fists around theirs. 'I'll sleep on the floor. He can have half my allowance. He doesn't eat much. He can wear my extra shoes. You already bought him a pair of pants and a shirt. I'll make him stay in the other room, out of your way, when you're home. He can help Rose.' She has squeezed her eyes shut with the effort of dredging up argument after argument and also, Rafferty thinks, because she is afraid to look at his face. He presses her hand to stop the flow.
'He can fix the faucet,' she says. 'You always say you'll fix it, but you never do. He can get that spot out of the carpet. He can-'
Rose says, 'Miaow, did he tell you to ask Poke if he could stay with us?'
Miaow's eyes open. She looks surprised. 'No,' she says. 'I don't even know if he will.'
'It's just not a good idea, Miaow,' Rafferty says. 'I'll try to find someplace else for him.'
She drums her feet against the sofa in frustration. 'That will take weeks. And he won't stay there. He needs to be here.' She looks at Rafferty with an expression he has never seen on her face before. 'He needs me.' She brings her hands up, head high, in a prayerlike wai of supplication. 'This time he needs me.'
Rafferty looks at Rose, and Rose looks at Rafferty. Rose closes her eyes, seceding from the discussion. Rafferty sits back, feeling the 'No' rise up in him. And then he sees Miaow being lifted through the window of a car.
'Not for long,' he says. 'One week, two weeks. Until he feels better and we can find a place for him to stay.'
'Really?' Miaow's eyes fill half her face.
'Go get him,' Rafferty says. 'Let's see if we can talk him into it.'
13
Mr. Ulrich used us both times,' the lady behind the desk at Bangkok Domestics says in crisp English.
She is in her forties, clinging grimly to twenty-eight. Her face is white with powder, and her hair has been dyed blacker than a crow's wing and lacquered into a rigid little wave in front that would probably shatter if touched. Her uniform is a frilly lavender junior-miss business suit that sports buttons the size of the door-knobs. It looks like something a small girl would wear on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.
The wall behind her is a panorama of past glory. The anxious woman sitting at the desk is pictured in happier times with some of Bangkok's most media-hungry socialites, faded snap after faded snap attesting to a once- thriving concern, supplying domestic help to the wives of the rich and-given the topsy-turvy world of Thai politics- the occasionally powerful.
But now she sits behind a scratched wooden desk in a room barely big enough to exhale into. On the desk, facing Rafferty, is a file, topped by an official-looking form adorned with many impressive seals. One of them, Rafferty notices, is a United States Boy Scouts seal. In the blank for NAME, he reads: Miss Tippawan Dangphai.
'Doughnut,' Rafferty says. 'Any idea why Doughnut?'
The woman barely shrugs. 'Who knows? We have one girl nicknamed Pogo and two who call themselves Banana. Several years back we had one named Aspirin. Girls,' she says, as though this explains everything, which it probably does.
A passport-size black-and-white photo has been stapled to the form, next to a blank space where a fingerprint should be. Despite the frivolous nickname, Doughnut is not a particularly blithe-looking girl. She faces the camera glumly, with the attitude of one who knows the picture will not come out. The camera has been kind to the large, beautiful eyes, but it has muddied the dark skin of Isaan, in the northeast. Aside from the eyes, she is not a striking woman. Her face is as wide as it is long, her lower lip too full, and her nose has virtually no bridge to it. It is a face Rafferty sees everywhere in Bangkok, the face of refugees from Isaan's broken villages and barren farms and no rain. On the basis of the photo, Doughnut would be difficult to pick out of a lineup.
'So the first maid stayed with him for ten years?'
'Or more.' She makes a patient show of checking a piece of paper in front of her. 'Ten years and seven months.'
'And then he called you for a replacement.'
'Nine weeks ago.' She pauses. 'As I said.'
He feels a flare of irritation. 'So you did. And, as I said a minute ago, the man's disappeared, and so has the maid. The maid you selected for him.' He sits back, watching her, and then puts out an index finger to move the Bangkok Domestics business card he took from Claus Ulrich's desk. 'The maid whose fingerprint you forgot to get.'
She straightens, and laces her fingers together on the desk. 'Surely there's no question that the maid had anything to do with it.'
'Isn't there? Do you know where she is? Has she called to say she's available for work again?'
The air-conditioning unit kicks out for a moment and then kicks in with a depressed hum, something it does every forty seconds or so. However thriving it may once have been, the present Bangkok Domestics is a one-room operation, housed in a deteriorating four-story walk-up in the Pratunam area of the city. If the firm is profitable these days, it is saving a fortune on office space.
'Has she?' Rafferty asks again, since the woman has apparently slipped into a meditative trance, staring down at her file.
'No,' she says, without looking up. A furrow appears between her eyebrows, and a fine snow of face powder sifts down toward her lap.
'Right,' Rafferty says. 'Tell me what the police will say. A missing farang, a missing Thai maid, who cleaned out her room before she left. A farang woman who's come to Bangkok to try to find him. Tell me what the police will say.'
'The police are not involved,' she says, tidying the piles of paper on her desk.
'Not officially,' Rafferty says. He holds up his cell phone. 'But perhaps they could be helpful.' The woman blinks twice. He begins to dial.
She tells him what he wants to know.
What Claus Ulrich requested-what he had requested both times from Bangkok Domestics-was a relatively young woman, in her early twenties, who could cook and clean and who had at least one strong reference.
'And she had a reference?' Rafferty asks.
A hesitation. The woman's eyes drop to the file again but don't focus on it. 'Yes.'
'I want to talk to the reference.'
'Oh, no,' the woman says immediately. 'Out of the question.'
