'That's what I eat,' she says patiently. 'Every morning.'
'Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,' his mother says in his voice.
'Is that why you're just drinking coffee?' She makes a grimace. 'Coffee.' She says it the way she might say 'mucus.' 'Bean drink. Hot bean drink. And you give me a hard time.'
'I'm a grown-up. I don't need breakfast.'
'And you hate it,' Miaow says.
'There's that,' he acknowledges.
'I hate it, too. This is my breakfast. A Coke and an orange. Unless we have grapes.'
'I see.' He has run out of things to say, so he gets up and grabs an orange and a can of warm Coke. 'It's a pretty awful breakfast,' he says, pouring the Coke.
'I know,' she says, closing the subject.
'Ice?' The question is ridiculous and he knows it.
She doesn't even look up. 'Oh, please.' She manages to pack into the words a remarkable amount of world- weariness for someone who's only eight.
'I have to say something, Miaow. It's sort of my job.'
'I'm used to being alone in the morning,' she says with a tinge of grumpiness.
'Me, too.' He sits across the counter from her on the living-room side, so he can see her face. The two grumps share a companionable silence as she peels her orange. Its sharp fragrance invades his nostrils. He can hear the Coke fizzing in the glass. He feels inexplicably happy. How could he have missed this for so many mornings?
'What are we supposed to be talking about?' she says with her mouth full.
'I want you to stay with me,' he says.
She looks up at him, chewing. 'I am staying with you.'
'No. I mean forever. Permanently.' After what he went through with Rose, he has no idea how Miaow will react. He can feel his heart bumping its way around inside his chest as though it's gotten lost.
She looks quickly away, her face closed. For a long moment, she works on chewing her orange. Then she says, 'Okay.'
Rafferty makes a firm decision that he will not burst into tears. He concentrates on the orange, half peeled on the table, on how the light strikes the jeweled sections and the fine white threads, and then he says, 'Up until now we've been kind of breaking the law. I want to adopt you. Officially. Do you know what that means?'
She still has not looked at him. 'Sure,' she says. 'It means you're really my…um, my father. Instead of just pretend.'
'That's right.' He has difficulty getting the words out, and she darts him a glance at the sound of his voice, then looks away again. He clears his throat and says, 'That's what I want.'
'Oh,' she says to the refrigerator. Then she says, 'Me, too.'
Oranges smell like happiness, Rafferty thinks. 'We have to go talk to a man today. He's a nice man named Hank Morrison.'
'Khun Hank,' she says. 'All the kids know him.'
'Do they like him?'
'He helps.' Her enthusiasm is somewhat reserved.
'Well, we have to go talk to him today, after school. He's going to ask us questions, about how we live here and about what happened to you before you came here.'
Her shoulders rise protectively. 'What kind of questions?'
'About everything,' he says.
She looks him full in the face and then, slowly, lowers her eyes until she is gazing at the surface of the counter. With a coiled index finger, she strikes the half orange, sending it spinning.
Rafferty waits until the orange wobbles to a stop. 'He'll ask you some questions I've never asked you. I want you to promise me you'll tell him the truth.'
'He doesn't have to know everything,' she says. 'Nobody has to know everything.'
'He has to know everything.'
Her face sets. 'No.' She strips a thread from the orange and rolls it into a tight ball between thumb and forefinger, then flicks it-hard-across the room at the refrigerator. Her spine is rigid.
'It's to help us. He has to ask the questions, or the police won't let me adopt you.'
She pushes her chair back stiffly, ignoring the half-eaten orange. 'I'm going to be late for school.'
'So you'll be late. What're they going to do, chop you up and fry you?' He puts a hand flat on the counter between them. 'Listen, Miaow, I can make you a promise. I promise he won't tell me what you talk about if you don't want him to. But you have to talk to him.'
She looks down at her lap, evaluating the weight of the promise. 'We'll see,' she says, and Rafferty hears his own equivocation, refined over a lifetime, coming back at him, from a child he has known only a few months. As he watches her shoulder her book pack and close the door behind her, he wonders what other dubious gifts he may have passed on.
Ulrich's drapes are open. Someone has been here. Rafferty pauses at the door, holding it open, listening. It is not difficult for him to imagine someone else standing absolutely still in one of the rooms, listening as well. After a minute or so, he figures the hell with it and goes in. He picks up one of the small stone apsarases, hefts it like a club, grabs the gun with his free hand, and does a quick search. He is alone.
The place is hot again. As little as he wants to touch them, he has come to look for manufacturers' marks on the whips and restraints in the bottom drawer of the cabinet; they might tell him where they were bought. He is dreading the moment he has to pick them up. The instant he enters the office, he stops as suddenly as he would if he had walked into a glass door.
Uncle Claus's CD-ROMs are back.
Not all of them, he sees, as he nears the desk. There are three empty slots in the storage tower. The others have been returned, presumably by whoever removed them in the first place, which-according to the woman next door-had been Doughnut. Considering all the trouble she took to gain access to Claus Ulrich's life in the first place and the care with which she erased her presence when she left, it must have been important to her to return to take these things away, and equally important to bring them back.
He sits down at the desk and turns on the computer. While he waits for it to go through its internal checklist, he opens the first of the CD cases, which says WINDOWS 98.
The disk inside is home-burned from a blank available everywhere in Bangkok, ten disks for two to ten bucks, depending on the gullibility of the buyer. Written neatly near the center, in black permanent marker, is the notation 'AT Series 400–499.'
AT Series. AT Enterprises, the letterhead in the drawer. He opens the next case, watching the irritating hourglass on the computer screen and asking himself for the thousandth time why they couldn't have programmed the damn thing to actually fill with sand so you'd have some idea how far along you are. How difficult could it be? The second disk is in a box that says COREL WORDPERFECT, but it too is home-burned. The notation says 'AT Series 600–699.'
He opens all the cases, arranging the disks by number. When he's finished, he has a pile of jewel boxes on the floor and thirteen disks spread out across the desk, beginning with AT Series 0001–0099 and ending with 1500–1599. Missing are 500–599, 700–799, and 800–899.
The computer is ready at last. He slaps the 0001–0099 disk in the drive and looks at the directory.
The files are, as promised, numbered AT 0001 through AT 0099. They are.jpg files, which means pictures. His heart sinks at the information. He does not really think he wants to look at these.
And until he sees the first one, he has no idea how right he is.
Chouk has asked himself a hundred times whether he should make the payment he promised the guard. He knows the risks, knows it is one of the few times he will be exposed. For the first time since he intercepted the maid to take delivery of the money, he will have to arrange a meeting. Madame Wing will be far more vigilant, now that he has returned her money, shredded into scrap, and made his second demand.
How he wishes he could have been there when she opened the suitcases. Perhaps the guard knows how she
