plan to discuss with Madame Wing.'
Oh, well. 'I plan to ask her about a maid who used to work here.'
It is not what the man expected. His eyebrows go up the width of a hair. 'A maid? You could have talked to me about that.'
'You didn't write the letter of reference. She did.'
The look he receives is not without a hint of pity. He shakes his head. 'Then come.'
The two of them go up the stairs and through a wide doorway into the house. The dark interior space slowly resolves itself into a series of long, high chambers with richly grained wooden walls. Teak floors gleam underfoot, slatted with ribbons of sunlight flowing through the louvers over the windows. Although the air is not hot, it is stuffy and close, as though the house has not been open to the breeze for years. It could be the air in the Pyramids, Rafferty thinks. He follows Jeeves like a good soldier into a smaller room with a single easy chair in it, directly in front of a standing sandstone Buddha that is probably a thousand years old.
'Sit here,' the man says, stepping aside and indicating the chair, as though he does not expect Rafferty to know what it is.
'What about Madame?' It is the only chair in the room.
'Madame brings her chair with her.' Jeeves leaves the room. Outdoors he marches; indoors he glides.
Rafferty takes a good look at the Buddha, at the calm face with its upturned lips and almond eyes, the long earlobes a symbol of spirituality. It is, he realizes, possibly the best Khmer carving he has ever seen, a prize for any museum in the world. On the opposite wall of the room hangs a broken piece of stone, perhaps six feet in length and four feet high, covered from top to bottom with bas-reliefs: the everyday life of the tenth century, not that different in most respects from life in the Cambodian countryside today. People long dead and turned to dust sit at tables and drink, play games, roast a pig over a fire, plant rice, push a wooden cart. Spaced evenly along the stone's ragged edges are the remnants of holes bored to seat the low-yield explosives that were used to break the fragment free. Rafferty cannot look at it without anger, wondering which of Cambodia's extraordinary temples was plundered to decorate this airless room.
The silence is pierced by a thin, insistent squealing from somewhere in the house. Rafferty backs away from the fragment of temple wall and seats himself in the armchair. The sound grows louder, and a woman comes around the corner and into view. She is tiny and angular, her sharp joints folded batlike into a wheelchair that is too big for her. The chair stops in the doorway, without entering the room, and the squealing stops with it.
She regards him without expression. For a moment he actually wonders if she is blind, simply directing her eyes where she knows the armchair will be.
'Madame Wing,' he says, just to break the silence.
Her chin comes up a quarter of an inch, and all the planes of her face shift. Her eyes actually register him for the first time. She is thin to the point of being gaunt, the bones of her face as sharp as a cubist painting, the skull slowly surfacing beneath the flesh. The hands grasping the rubber wheels are all knuckles. The skin stretched over them has turned a peculiar bruised-looking purple.
'You came,' she says with a hint of satisfaction. The voice, low and rough, scrapes Rafferty's ears. Despite the grandeur of her home, there is nothing refined about the way she sounds. She rolls herself a foot or so into the room. The wheelchair squeals again.
'You should get Jeeves to oil that thing.'
She stops the chair's motion and regards him coldly. He has been regarded coldly before-he thinks of himself as an expert at being regarded coldly-but this is something entirely new. She looks at him as he might look at a snake coiled on his pillow. 'His name is Pak, and you do not tell me what to do.'
'Just a suggestion.'
'Not ever,' she says. Now that he can see her eyes more clearly, he wishes he could not. They are extraordinarily luminous eyes, but the light in them seems all to be reflected. They have the shine of an animal that can see in the dark. He can see the white all the way around the circles of her irises. 'You have questions to ask me before I come to my business. Ask them.'
Her business? Rafferty doesn't want any part of this woman's business, whatever it is. 'You had a maid here,' he says. 'She may know something about a man I'm trying to find.'
She draws herself up in the chair. It makes her seem both larger and heavier, despite her apparent frailty. 'What man?'
'An Australian named-'
'No,' she says, closing the subject. She sits back. 'I know nothing of Australians.'
'Actually,' he says, 'it's the maid you can probably help me with.' He holds up the note from Bangkok Domestics. 'You wrote a letter about her.'
She extends a skeletal hand, a knot of knuckles and rings. It is absolutely still. Whatever health problems she may have, none of them causes her hands to tremble.
Rafferty begins to unfold the letter, but she gives the hand a peremptory shake, and he finds himself getting up to give it to her. 'Sit,' she says, the moment she has it. She does not look up to see if he does as he is told.
As she unfolds the letter, he gets a chance to look at her without having to face those unsettling eyes. Her hair, still mostly black, is pulled back into a bun so tight it looks like it hurts. The emaciated face is dark but not heavily lined, and Rafferty revises his estimate of her age. At first sight he thought seventy. Now he thinks she could be anywhere from fifty to sixty.
'This girl,' she says at last, precisely refolding the letter. 'She is of no account.'
'She may have information I need.'
She drops the letter into her lap. 'Why should I care?'
'Not a reason in the world. You said you'd see me, so I thought-'
'I do not care what you thought. The girl was dismissed because she could not accept discipline. I have no idea where she went.'
'How long did she work here before you fired her?'
The gaze she gives him says the question is an impertinence. 'Seven weeks, eight weeks.'
'If you fired her, why did you write her a letter of reference?'
'Why does that matter?'
'It's a natural question. The letter got her hired by someone else, and now that person is missing, and so is she.'
Something very unpleasant happens to her mouth. 'Are you suggesting that this might involve me?'
'It involves you to the extent that it brought me here.'
'I brought you here,' she says imperiously. 'Not this stupid girl.'
'And if I came, so will others. Who knows who they'll be?'
The hands drop to the chair's wheels as though she intends to leave the room. Instead she moves it forward several inches, squealing her way closer to Rafferty. When she is close enough to make him wish he could move the armchair backward, the squealing stops and the silence of the house once again presses against his ears, like water.
'And who do you think they might be?' she asks.
The intensity of the question unnerves him. 'Could be anyone. The police, the Australian embassy.'
She nods a tenth of an inch. Her lids drop slightly, hooding the eyes for a merciful moment, and then she turns to the carved stone on the wall. Her gaze travels left to right, like those of someone reading a newspaper. When she has finished, she says, without looking at him, 'That's hardly anyone.' Then she lifts her hands and claps once. The sound is still ringing in Rafferty's ears when Jeeves steps into the doorway.
'This horrible girl,' she says, handing him the letter. 'Bring the file.'
Pak doesn't bow, but it's close. 'Yes, Madame Wing.' He is gone, and she shifts her eyes to Rafferty. The whites are a nicotine yellow. 'The man is probably dead,' she says, with no change in tone. 'Everybody dies. It is the only thing we have in common.'
Not many replies spring to mind. 'Why did you write the letter?'
'She was making a lot of noise.'
'But you knew she wasn't good at her job.'
She looks puzzled. 'What does that matter to me? At any rate, other people's households are not as disciplined as this one.'
