reacted. That alone would almost be worth the risk of paying him.
Why had Tam looked at the photos? He has talked with Tam incessantly in his head since that night, trying to explain why he pulled the trigger: the risk that Tam would turn on him, that he would go to Madame Wing. No one can be allowed to prevent Chouk from completing his work. He has made promises to too many people who are now long gone.
But still, Tam had loved his wife, and she probably loved him in return. Chouk has ruined two lives.
It is fitting, he thinks, that Tam had known him by a different name. Chouk no longer knows who he is; he is as hollow as a ghost. All that remains is the course he has set. Motion is everything.
He is no longer Chouk Ran. He is just whoever it is who is doing this.
And she will pay for that, and for all those she destroyed.
But still, the bits of him that remain are troubled. He killed Tam, and if he does not pay the guard, he will have abandoned both of the people who helped him. He could not have done what he has already done without their aid. Even though they did it for money, not because they believed in his mission.
He looks around the rented room he has slept in for two nights. Unlike the flophouses, here there are no rows of bunks; it has a door and walls to keep people out. He needed the privacy to handle the money. The large shredder he bought at the office store gleams in the corner. He should probably change rooms, but he can't face the work of moving the shredder. He had no idea how heavy it would be.
With a strong feeling he is doing the wrong thing, he goes down to the street to find a pay phone.
A cheap hotel room. It could be any of a thousand hotels, anywhere in Southeast Asia. Cold light comes through a small window. It is probably raining.
The bed is narrow, with a garish red coverlet. The floor is dirty linoleum. There is no rug or other furniture except an attached bed table and a large, old-style phone with a dial.
A number hotel, maybe.
In 1982.
Uncle Claus's camera had an automatic date-stamp function, and he occasionally forgot to turn it off. The picture on the screen is dated 9-16-82.
The little girl hog-tied on the bed was somewhere between eight and ten on September 16, 1982. The ropes bite into her wrists and ankles, and her defenseless stomach is bare and streaked with red.
She is crying.
The series began with photos of her wearing the clothes of poor Southeast Asian children everywhere: T- shirt, shorts, sandals. She had been smiling in the first few shots. She stopped smiling when her clothes began to come off. She started crying when the hot red wax dripped from the candle onto her bare chest.
After he has looked at fifteen or twenty pictures, Rafferty gets up and goes to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. On his way back to the computer, he stops at the filing cabinet and, for the first time, forces himself to pull out the restraints, the leather straps and gags and handcuffs and the collar with the spikes set into its edges that are designed to cut into the neck and chest.
They are tiny.
He returns to the screen and searches further through the pictures, feeling the fury rise in him, mixed with a swelling terror. He has difficulty forcing himself to keep his eyes on the screen, and he jumps to his feet and steps back, believing for a moment he will pass out, when he gets to the picture of the child with the electric iron on her chest. Her right arm is thrown over her eyes, her mouth wide in pain. Her ankles had been cuffed together so she couldn't kick in self-defense.
He was in some of the pictures, too, a naked fat man with his face crudely blacked out with Magic Marker. He held a camera remote in one hand, with a button at one end of it. He depressed the button to snap a picture whenever he was satisfied with the level of monstrosity being inflicted on the bright red bed.
There are almost sixteen hundred of them.
Rafferty feels the sickness and the fear rise up in him again, but he forces them away and then lets the fear back in, lets it drive him forward despite his revulsion as he keeps looking, opening one disk after another, paging through the photos as quickly as the computer will allow, looking at nothing but the faces and paying special attention to the later ones, the 1300, 1400, and 1500 series, some of which are date-stamped within the past three to four years. The most recent image with a date stamp, AT1548, was taken in 2003.
He is looking for Miaow.
This is something she would never talk to him about. She would never talk about it to anyone. If it is here, if she is here, he has to know it before they meet with Hank Morrison in-what? Three or four hours? He has been here, in this hell, for hours.
If she is among these tiny victims he needs to know it, before he forces her to tell this story to Morrison. Face after face, scream after scream, he searches for her.
And finds Superman.
He is one of only four boys. Uncle Claus definitely preferred to torment girls. He gave special attention to the boys, however. They presented a different set of anatomical possibilities. What he did to Superman passes Rafferty's understanding so completely that it seems like the work of a different species.
Sixteen hundred photos. At least forty children.
By the time Rafferty turns off the computer, he could kill Claus Ulrich himself.
The phone rings deep in the pocket of Rafferty's jeans, hard to fish out in the cramped backseat of a tuk-tuk. He doesn't even hear it at first. He is trying to lose himself in the heat and light of the day, trying to leave the morning and its bright, terrible screen behind. It is a window he wishes he had never opened.
He wrestles the phone free on the fifth ring and surveys the traffic in front of him. If they don't get a break, he is going to be late meeting Miaow.
'Poke,' Arthit says. 'There's a lot happening. The stains in the bathroom are blood.'
'Good.'
'Excuse me?'
'The man was a pig. No, that's not fair to pigs. I'll tell you about it when I see you.'
'And another thing. The address for Doughnut's sister was real, but she's moved. A while back, one neighbor says. But, Poke? The blood changes things. I've got two patrolmen talking to everyone in the building. She must have told someone where she was going.'
'That's great,' Rafferty says. He has to force himself to pay attention.
There is a pause, Arthit undoubtedly evaluating Rafferty's tone. 'Are you okay?'
'Peachy. By the way, the Cambodian definitely got Madame Wing's attention.' He tells Arthit about the note and the suitcase.
'Ten million baht?' Arthit sounds like he is trying to swallow a whole chicken, perhaps alive. 'Shredded? That's a whole new kind of hatred.'
'Let's hope it was only nine million and he kept a million to pay the guard.' Rafferty heaves a sigh that seems to come from the navel. 'For now I guess the thing to do is to find the sister.'
'If we get something, where will you be?'
'Adopting a child,' Rafferty says.
32
Taking the chain from around his neck, Rafferty unlocks the cabinet and puts the CD-ROMs, minus their bootleg cases, inside. They fill the space. He does not return the gun.
A sport coat he never wears conceals the bulge at his waistband. In the mirror he sees himself pale-faced and drawn, overdressed and already perspiring.
He flops heavily down on the couch to wait, wondering how he can face Superman. For that matter, he's not
