hands his to him is icier than the beer.
The beer is so cold it's thickening in the glass. The chill makes Rafferty's sinuses ache, and the fat, skunky fragrance fills his nostrils as he swallows. He feels better immediately. 'What about my Cambodian?' he asks.
Arthit looks over at Rose, who is pretending not to listen, and lowers his voice. 'You going to go on with this?'
'Sure,' Rafferty says.
'I don't know, Poke.'
'Well, I do. I can use that money. Miaow and I-'
'Obviously,' Arthit says, 'but it won't do her much good if you're dead.'
'Everybody underestimates me.' Rafferty takes another pull at his beer to accelerate the healing process. 'It's my secret weapon.'
'Up to you,' Arthit says in the tone of someone who realizes that rational argument is not an option. 'There was only one Cambodian in the cell.' He reaches into his tattered leather briefcase and takes out a sheaf of papers, fastened with a clip. 'Chouk Ran. Age fifty-one. Here legally. No prior arrests. Five feet seven, dark complexion, left hand badly mangled. Missing fingernails. He was staying in a flophouse when he was arrested.'
'For what?'
'Shoplifting at Foodland. Put up a fuss when he got caught, so they called the cops.'
'Shoplifting at Foodland?' Rafferty asks. 'Come on. I know people who have been caught there. You give it back and slip the manager five hundred baht. They say thank you and good night. It's probably a line item in their spreadsheets.'
'He wouldn't play. Had plenty of money in his pocket, too.'
'What'd he take?'
Arthit grins. 'An electric mixer. One of those things for cakes. In a box, no less.'
'Not exactly something you can slip under a T-shirt. He just try to walk out with it?'
'Big as life.'
'My, my,' Rafferty says. 'Either he really, really wanted to bake a cake or he wanted to go to jail.'
'Good place to meet crooks,' Arthit says.
Rafferty moves his head slowly from side to side and notices a novel blurring in the center of his vision as the room slides by. Pharmaceutical special effects. 'Got a picture?'
'Of course.' Arthit folds back the top sheet to show Rafferty a photocopy of a mug shot. The man has a dark shock of hair, stiff as a whiskbroom, that seems to grow sideways on his head; a straight, strong mouth; and the eyes of someone who has seen considerably more than he was prepared to see. He stares at the camera as though it were a gun pointed at his head.
'Not one of the guys in the alley,' Rafferty says. The photo swims a little bit in front of him.
'Too much to hope for.' Arthit hands the papers to Rafferty. 'I have no idea where you got these.'
'If you were this guy, Arthit, where would you be?'
'It depends on what he's doing,' Arthit says. 'But if what Madame Wing said is true, I'd bet he won't get too far from her.'
'I don't think he'll get too close either,' Rafferty says. He holds Arthit's gaze. 'You haven't met Madame Wing.'
The Sizzler, which Superman chose since the meal is in his honor, is part of a little snarl of vehemently American fast-food mills on Silom that includes a Pizza Hut and a McDonald's. The boy wears one of his new shirts, the front geometrically adorned with a rectangle of creases where it was folded around the department-store stiffener. He keeps sharpening the creases between thumb and forefinger, and Rafferty realizes it is probably the first new prefolded shirt he has ever worn. The scrape over his eye has turned into a broad calligraphy brushstroke of brown.
He looks very happy.
He eats two sirloin steaks, barely chewing. His glance keeps floating up from the carnage on his plate to Rafferty. Miaow watches him eat with openmouthed admiration, as though he had personally materialized the food before eating it.
Arthit has abandoned them, gone home to Noi.
'I'm going to walk back,' Rafferty says when they hit the pavement. It is almost nine o'clock, and the vendors are crowding the sidewalk across the street.
'We'll all walk,' Rose says. She has thawed some during dinner.
'No, Rose, if you don't mind.' The children are not exactly appropriate to this particular errand. 'I'm going to take my time, work out some of this stiffness. And I have some thinking to do.' He reaches across them and punches Superman lightly on the shoulder. The boy's eyes go wide, and then he grins and feints a punch back. 'Thanks again,' Rafferty says.
When Rose and the children are half a block away, he crosses Silom. It seems to take a long time, and he recognizes that the pills are still at work. Walking a bit more deliberately than usual, he shoulders his way into the throng moving slowly in the narrow corridor between the rows of stalls. Watches, clothes, wood carvings, bootleg compact discs and audiotapes, hill-tribe artifacts, fake antiques, and silver jewelry gleam in the overhead spotlights.
The dark spaces are what he wants. Without Arthit's guidance he would have walked right past them and not given them a glance.
Dim little pools among the brightness. Just a card table with a man sitting behind it. On each card table are five or ten of the bright plastic albums that drugstores put snapshots in.
Rafferty stops at the first of the booths.
'Sit,' the man says, pushing an overturned yellow plastic bucket toward him.
'Japanese,' Rafferty says, and the man selects a stack of albums and shoves it across the table. Rafferty flips it open.
It is full of glossy color photos, five inches by seven, slipped into transparent sleeves just like pictures from a family holiday. Each photo is the neatly trimmed cover of a video box. Schoolgirls-or, rather, young women dressed in the Japanese schoolgirl uniform-peer up at him in improbably suggestive poses. Beaming girls wearing strategically positioned suds advertise videos set in 'soaplands,' the anything-goes Japanese version of the massage parlor. Close-ups of fresh-scrubbed faces promote the newest stars, most of whom look as though they've lived their entire lives on cotton candy and never uttered a nasty word. A year from now, these innocents will be dancing at Tokyo strip clubs that offer blow jobs in a little booth at the rear.
The second and third albums offer more of the same. 'Anything special?' Rafferty asks.
The man counts down two or three more albums and pulls one out. Women with women, women with animals, women in the bathroom. Rafferty races through them in self-defense, but two pictures make him stop. Both feature women who have been tied up and handcuffed. He shows them to the man behind the table. 'More?'
The man glances at the photos, and his mouth turns down. 'Not have.'
'Do you know this man?' Rafferty asks, showing him the photograph of Claus Ulrich. He gets a quick glance and a shake of the head.
'Thanks for the use of the bucket,' Rafferty says, getting up. Too quickly: there is a little pop in his head and a sudden brightening of his vision. He has to put out a hand to remain upright.
By the time he has hit three stalls, Rafferty has learned to stand more slowly. He has also developed an unaffectionate appreciation for the sheer volume and variety of Japanese porn. The fourth booth is presided over by an imperious-looking woman in her early thirties wearing a great many silver bracelets. She is doing business as fast as she can; Rafferty has to wait for an unoccupied bucket.
'Japanese,' he says, and as a shortcut he adds, 'special.'
'No problem.' She reaches under the table and brings out a stack of albums almost a foot high. The bracelets jingle gaily. 'Have everything,' she says proudly.
And she does.
If asked, Rafferty would have said he had led a reasonably active and varied sex life, but what he sees when he opens the first album makes him feel twelve years old. Vegetables? Dead fish? Panty hose? Diapers? There
