The man who called himself Chon stands over the hole, looking down, waiting to shoot again if he must. The flashlight is gripped beneath his left arm, and the right hand holds the silenced pistol. His mouth is a sad, tight line. Tam lies facedown in the muddy water, one arm raised, caught against the side of the hole, the fingers extended like someone waving good-bye.
When it is evident that Tam is not going to move, the man who calls himself Chon puts the gun in his pocket, skirts the hole, and picks up the envelope and the photographs. Without looking at the pictures, he slides them back inside the envelope. Then he lays the envelope on top of Tam's jacket and jumps into the hole.
It takes him a minute to wrestle Tam out of the mud, rolling him onto the lawn before he climbs out himself. He lifts Tam by the shoulders and drapes him over the safe on his stomach, his arms and legs splayed out. The man studies the effect for a moment and then picks up the envelope and slips it into the front of his pants, flat against his stomach. He bends down again and grabs Tam's jacket and spreads it out on the lawn several feet away, in the direction of the house, making it as big as he can.
He does not fill in the hole. Instead he lays the shovel down so the cutting edge is pointing like an arrow toward the dark opening.
Twenty-two minutes later, when the guard returns, he first sees the great splash of mud around the hole, then the shovel, and then Tam's body. He stops where he stands as though listening for something; then very slowly turns in a full circle, scanning the grassy area, washed by moonlight, and the deep shadows beneath the trees. When he has completed his circle, he moves, as tentatively as someone who expects the ground to give way beneath him, up the lawn toward the house.
At the border of a flower bed, he stoops and comes up with a large, smooth, white stone, the size of a small coconut. He takes the stone in both hands, raises it high, and brings it down with all his strength on the top of his own head.
His knees soften and he staggers, but once he has regained his equilibrium, he raises the stone again and brings it down once more, striking the same spot on his head. He reaches up to the wound. When he brings his hand away, it is slick with blood. He smears the blood on his face and shirt and then walks, as carefully as a drunk man, down to the edge of the pier, where he drops the stone in the grass, where he is sure it will be found. His story will need all the support he can provide. As he works his way back toward the house, wobbling on legs that will barely carry his weight, he paints himself with more blood.
At the back door, he pauses and listens, although he knows the place is empty. Logically, he knows that the woman who owns the house can't be in two places at once, but after working for her for twenty years, nothing about her would surprise him. Squaring his shoulders, he goes inside.
The door closes behind him, and the moon shines down on the empty house and the dark figure sprawled on the lawn, the corona of mud surrounding the hole like the ring around a target, and the jacket empty and open like a signal. Empty and open like a flag.
2
A blur at the edge of sight, a blue blur across the sidewalk, and Rafferty feels Miaow stop in her tracks, yanking him back with all the mass an eight-year-old can muster. The blur collides with a stout woman, knocking her sideways. Hands grab at her to keep her from going down. The blur pauses just enough to resolve itself into a running child, and then Miaow drops Rafferty's hand like a stone, all but pushing him aside with a shriek that scrapes the upper limit of the audible spectrum.
The blue child launches itself off the sidewalk, splitting the distance between two cars, aloof as a subatomic particle, and vanishes into traffic. Miaow, her pigtails flying, has covered half the distance to the curb before Rafferty can get his body organized, but then he sets off at a dead run, without even scanning the crowd for Rose, who is somewhere ahead of them on the sidewalk, on her way to buy the evening's dinner.
Silom Road is jammed this late Sunday afternoon with shoppers and tourists threading between the sidewalk vendors' booths. Rafferty shoulders past several of them, earning a shout of warning in some unknown language, and then slams his hip against a rickety plywood booth piled with hill-tribe souvenirs as he sees Miaow leap from the curb and into the path of a battered taxi. More shouts as the booth splinters to the concrete behind him, the taxi swerves right, and then Miaow is gone, too.
When in doubt, Rafferty thinks, stop.
The sky is low enough to scrape a nail against, that peculiar sullen gray that usually precedes one of Bangkok's frequent rainstorms. Rafferty is aware of the livid greenness of the trees, of the wind that has kicked up to make the empty plastic bags dance on the pavement, of his heart hammering in the vein at the side of his neck. Aware that both children have disappeared.
The taxi that stopped for Miaow is stalled in front of him, and Rafferty skirts it at a trot, looking for anything that could be a running child. He hears another shout, across the six lanes of Silom this time, and the blue blur reappears and disappears in a blink around the corner of a narrow soi, leaving Rafferty with a mental snapshot of a dirty blue T-shirt and baggy, low-slung blue trousers, torn and flapping below the child's right knee. Hair, long and knotted, bounced over the blue shirt as he-she? — ran. Behind the ragged child, in full charge, is Miaow.
Spaces open between the cars in front of him, giving him just room enough to dodge between them. Miaow lived most of her eight years on the sidewalks of Bangkok before Rafferty found her, but he chases after her, weaving suicidally through traffic as though she were a rich, pampered preschooler wandering outside the family compound for the first time.
He gets across the street and under the elevated track for the sky train somehow-later he will be unable to remember any of it-but by the time he makes the turn into the soi, she is gone. The sidewalks host a few harried- looking pedestrians, all adults. There is not a child in sight.
The other end of the soi-one of the countless small streets branching off Silom-is too distant for Miaow to have reached it. The buildings are raw, shiny apartment houses, too new to have acquired the city's distinctive petrochemical tarnish. Their doors are guarded against unattached children. A third of the way down the block, he sees a driveway, leading to an open underground garage. He takes off at a run.
The driveway slopes so steeply that he has to lean backward against the incline. The afternoon sun has dropped behind the building, darkening the interior of the garage, and he slows to a walk, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
Thin, watery sunlight leaks through small, sidewalk-level ventilation grilles, casting elongated patterns on the concrete floor. The far corners fade into gloom. Fewer than twenty cars occupy a space big enough to accommodate a hundred.
'Miaow?' The name ping-pongs off the walls. Rafferty can hear his fear in the echoes.
Nothing. His pulse bumps beneath the skin of his throat like someone tapping him with a finger. Moving slowly toward the right side of the garage, where the majority of the cars are, he quiets his breathing so he can listen. Horns from the street, the catch of an engine. Outside, a woman laughs.
A scuffling sound off to his left terminates in a fierce, choked whisper.
Rafferty goes on the balls of his feet, moving faster. A cluster of dusty cars looms ahead, four or five of them. One of them rocks suddenly as something slams into its side. Rafferty starts running again, and when he rounds the car's rear fender, he sees Miaow planted on her backside on the cement floor, her feet wedged against a tire, both hands wrapped in the blue T-shirt of the other child, who is straining to pull away. The second child-it is a boy, Rafferty sees, with sharply angled cheekbones beneath a mat of filthy hair-flails at her arms with clenched fists.
The boy's back is to him. Miaow's eyes come up to meet Rafferty's, and he sees her shake her head no, although he's not sure what the no means, and the boy's head snaps around. When he catches sight of Rafferty, his eyes narrow so far they almost disappear, his lips peel back from his teeth in an animal snarl, and he screams, so high it goes through Rafferty's head like a bullet. It caroms off the walls in all directions, a human distress siren.
The boy kicks out at Miaow with new urgency, the torn trouser leg flapping against the thin calf, and Miaow
