The man nods and grabs his neck in pain.
'Pak did this?' Rafferty asks.
The man looks past him into the corridor to make sure Rafferty has come alone, and then he nods again. 'Pak and some others,' he says. Two of his front teeth have been broken. When he pronounces an s, he whistles.
'How long did they work on you?' Rafferty is speaking Thai.
'One hour, two hours, I don't know.'
Rafferty steps in and closes the door behind him. The bruised man retreats. The apartment is the size of a large closet, hot, with an unpainted concrete floor and one tiny window. A hot plate in the corner serves as a kitchen, and a mat on the floor passes for a bed. Except for a sagging wooden table with a television on it, there is no furniture. Clothes hang from nails driven into the walls, which were painted aquamarine quite a long time ago. The ceiling is high and clouded with cobwebs.
'Did you tell them who the thief was?' Rafferty seats himself on the floor, cross-legged. After a moment of gazing down at him, the man sits, too, grunting with the effort.
He licks his lips and winces as though it stings. 'I don't know who it was.'
Rafferty lets it pass. 'Did they make you help them get rid of the body?'
The man's good eye opens in alarm. 'What body?'
'Tam's,' Rafferty says, as if it were self-evident. 'The safecracker.'
'No body,' the man says. He is looking at a spot above Rafferty's head.
'We'll get along a lot better if you just assume I know everything,' Rafferty says. 'I'm talking about the body you found in or near the hole they dug. The Thai man who had been shot, once, in the back. The guy who actually opened the safe while the Cambodian-What's his name?'
The man studies him with the open eye but says nothing.
'Chouk,' Rafferty says, seeing the eye skitter away. 'While Chouk stood over him.'
'I don't know Chouk,' the man says. His voice has a thin, rippling edge to it, as though he doesn't have enough breath to support it.
'Of course you do. You let him onto the property. Or maybe you know him as Chon.'
'You should go,' the man says, starting to rise.
'You should have made him hit you for real,' Rafferty says, putting a hand on the man's shoulder and forcing him back down. It is pathetically easy to do. 'What happened? Did he forget? Or did you go away while he was working and come back after he left?'
'He did hit me,' the man says insistently. He leans forward and parts his hair to show Rafferty a nasty-looking wound on his scalp. 'He hit me from behind, with a rock.'
'Let's talk about the rock,' Rafferty says.
The guard closes his eyes. 'The rock?'
'Here's the way I figure it happened: You were on duty at the pier, vigilant as always. He pulled his boat in while your back was turned and tied it to the pier, and then he crept up the pier while your back was still turned, and then he went all the way across the lawn while your other back was turned, and he grabbed a stone from a row of them edging a flower bed, and then he crept all the way back down the lawn, while your back was turned, and hit you on the head with the rock. While all your backs were turned. Something like that?'
The man has paled. He opens his eyes and pats his bare chest, as though checking a pocket for cigarettes.
'You're not wearing a shirt,' Rafferty reminds him.
'Cigarette,' the man says. It is a croak.
Rafferty extends an empty hand and tilts it side to side to say he doesn't have any. 'You want a glass of water?'
'Never.' The man shudders. 'I'll never drink water again.'
'Pak didn't notice the rock,' Rafferty says. 'Nobody knows about it except you and me.'
'I need to think,' the man says.
'Want me to go down and get you some cigarettes while you work it out?'
'No. Yes.'
'My treat,' Rafferty says. He got up. 'Just make sure you're here when I get back, because if you're not, Madame Wing is going to be very upset with you.'
28
The guard was promised a million baht,' Rafferty says.
'Did he get it?' Arthit is on a car phone that keeps fritzing in and out.
'Not yet.'
'That might be good for us,' Arthit says. 'Unlikely as it seems, Chouk might try to make payment.'
'Chouk came up to him in a restaurant one night, sat down, and started talking. Said he had it all worked out, had the plan in place. All he needed was the location of the safe and a couple of hours on the property.'
'And the guard knew where the safe was.'
'Helped to dig the hole. He'd worked there almost twenty years.'
'He let these guys in after twenty years in the house? Doesn't say much for loyalty.'
'Madame Wing isn't someone who inspires much loyalty.'
Rafferty is lying full length on the couch, trying to find somewhere to rest his weight that doesn't hurt. Late- afternoon sun slants malevolently through the sliding glass door. Miaow has not come home from school yet, and the boy is off somewhere. Probably sharpening his teeth.
'You there?' Arthit asks.
'Just lolling around. It may be hard for you to imagine, Arthit, just how leisurely my life actually is.'
'What could be in a cardboard envelope that's worth a million baht?'
'For all I know, it's her diary. This is not a woman with a sunny past.'
'Does the guard have a way to reach Chouk?'
'He says not. Says Chouk will call him when the money's ready.'
'Trusting soul, isn't he?' Arthit says.
'He's barely sentient.'
'Are you going to tell Madame Wing about this?'
'I don't know,' Rafferty says. 'They really beat the shit out of him, and that was when they only suspected he was involved.'
'So what's the next move?'
'We assume he's going to get paid.'
'Why? Chouk's other little helper got killed.'
'Whatever was in that safe, I think Tam got shot because he saw it. The guard got off the property and stayed off. He didn't see anything.'
'So we watch the guard,' Arthit says. 'Wait for the payoff.'
'Can you do that without attracting too much attention?'
'Sure. I'll assign Cho to it.' Cho is Arthit's brother-in-law, a chubby, sweet-natured boy who took a degree in library science and then decided to be a policeman. The career move had been a mistake. 'It's perfect for Cho. He can sit in one place and eat noodles in the car, and all he has to do is make a phone call when the subject starts to move. Does the guy move around much? If he's more mobile than, say, the average couch, Cho will probably lose him.'
'At the moment he can barely make it to the bathroom. Who'll watch when Cho goes off?'
'I'll take care of that. I still have a fragile, if deteriorating, network of personal alliances at my disposal.'
'I'm sorry about all this, Arthit,' Rafferty says dutifully.
'Just keep your eyes open. My two colleagues probably aren't finished with you.'
