like to be disturbed at the end of the day, especially when they're rich and old and the evening's pleasures beckon, whatever they may be. Cocktails, perhaps. Bloody Marys with real blood, if the woman at Bangkok Domestics' description was accurate.
Much better to call from his apartment in the morning, at the start of a bright new day. The sun will be shining, the sky will be blue. The day will vibrate with promise. She's just an aged lady, he thinks. She will refuse him nothing.
15
No,' says the man on the phone for the second time.
'I only need a few minutes,' Rafferty says for the third time.
'She will not see you.'
'Then I'll talk to her on the phone.'
'Madame does not speak to people.' It is an older man's voice, stiff as wire. They are speaking Thai. Rafferty has a vision of a sort of Southeast Asian Jeeves, tall and long-fingered and immaculately shaven, possibly even wearing a morning coat.
'You haven't asked her.'
'I am not paid to ask her.'
'Then let me leave my number,' he says. 'Tell her I'm investigating a disappearance here in Bangkok and I need ten minutes of her time. It's important. I'm trying-'
'The number?' the man interrupts.
Rafferty recites his phone number and says, 'My name is-' He is talking to a dial tone.
'Thanks for your time,' he says, hanging up.
The day is, inevitably, bright and hot, with so much light pouring through the glass door that Rafferty has to squint against it. Rose has trudged off somewhere, visibly depressed by the failure of yesterday's potential clients to hire any of the faded flowers in her labor pool. Her despondence worries him. He suspects she has been lending the women small amounts of money to keep them from going back to the bars.
She should know better, he thinks, and then mentally slaps himself in the face. Like he knows better. Like he's a shining example of knowing better than to try to help people who probably can't be helped.
For example, Superman.
The events of the previous evening, welcoming Superman provisionally into the family, were bad enough to make Rafferty wish he could reformat his memory. He was up half the night trying to think of something, anything, he could do with the boy that won't break Miaow's heart.
After Miaow brought him up from the garage, the boy had greeted without visible enthusiasm the news that he could stay with them. He had gazed at Rafferty through the good eye and the swollen eye as though Rafferty were a dirty window with nothing interesting on the other side. When Rafferty had finished his little speech, Superman had waited to see whether there was going to be more talk, then turned and stalked down the hallway to Miaow's room.
Rafferty hadn't said anything, but his big, scrutable half-Anglo face evidently had, because Miaow said, 'He's happy.'
'Give him time,' Rose said.
'That's exactly what I am giving him,' Rafferty had said. He thought that both the words and his tone had been reasonable, but he saw from their expressions that he was facing the familiar wall of female solidarity, rooted in some profoundly obvious emotional reality that was completely invisible to him.
'You have to give it from your heart,' Rose said.
Rafferty said, 'I'm having trouble getting my chest open.'
That exchange had been the high point of the evening. It had been, on the whole, an evening to be forgotten as quickly and completely as possible.
'If I were Claus Ulrich,' Rafferty asks himself aloud, 'where would I be?' He crosses to his desk and idly opens and closes the screen on his laptop. 'Or,' he amends, 'if I were Claus Ulrich, who would I be?' He lifts the screen again.
As he sees it in the highly overrated light of morning, the errand he has undertaken can have five outcomes:
(1) He can find Uncle Claus alive and make Clarissa happy.
(2) He can find Uncle Claus dead and make her unhappy.
(3) He can find an Uncle Claus who is radically different from the one she thinks she knows, and break her heart.
(4) He can fail to find Uncle Claus at all and leave everything unresolved.
Or (5) Arthit's renegade cops could kill him.
The dinner with Superman-the First Supper, as he's beginning to think of it-had been well beyond grim.
The children had sat on one side of the table and the adults on the other. Rose had talked enough for four, and Miaow had eaten enough for two. The boy, for the most part, had stared at his food as though he expected it to start wriggling on the dish. At one point Miaow had broken a spring roll in half and reached over and put it in his mouth, and he had removed it and dropped it on her plate as though it were a stone. Rafferty had fought the impulse to pull the cloth off the table, dishes and all.
'You have to eat something,' he finally said. 'Rose cooked this food for us, and you have to eat something.'
The boy had looked at Rafferty for a good count of ten and picked up the half a spring roll and put it in his mouth. Then he had chewed it, noisily and deliberately, for at least five minutes. He had swallowed it three times. Then he pushed his chair from the table and sauntered down the hallway to Miaow's room.
This performance had been followed by a long silence. Rose ate as though nothing had happened. Rafferty counted to a hundred. Miaow stared at her lap.
'He wants to show you he won't eat much,' she finally said.
'He's smoking yaa baa,' Rafferty replied.
'He's just confused,' Rose said placidly, helping herself to some more noodles. 'He doesn't know what he's supposed to do, and that makes him angry. He needs time.'
'Not smoking,' Miaow said very softly.
'How do you know?' Rafferty had asked.
'Not smoking,' Miaow repeated more loudly.
'Fine,' Rafferty retreated. 'He's not smoking. Tell him he has to eat, Miaow. It's the only way I'm going to know.'
'He's not smoking,' Rose said. 'He just doesn't know what he feels.'
And they left it there. The boy had slept on the couch in the living room, with Rafferty rejecting Miaow's repeated offer to give him the top level of her bunk bed, and when Rafferty woke up, he was gone. Rafferty secretly hopes he won't return.
He has started a game of solitaire on the computer when the phone rings.
'Poke,' Arthit says. 'Do you have a pencil?'
'Of course,' he says. 'I'm a writer.'
'While you try to find one,' Arthit says, 'here's an update. No results on the photograph yet in either Phuket or Phang Nga. There are four guys working on it now, but there are a lot of people to talk to. So far, though, no one recognizes him either alive or dead.'
Rafferty is opening and closing drawers. 'That's because he wasn't down there.'
'Maybe not. Got the pencil yet?'
'Yeah, yeah.' The one that has come to hand is dimpled with the tooth marks Rose always puts into it when
