but also reports that the woman who runs the business had treated her with contempt, it is almost a relief for Rafferty to pick up the phone and methodically take the woman apart. When he is finished, Superman is regarding him with raised eyebrows that signal something like admiration.
While Miaow was at school, Rafferty played Tetris on his computer with Superman and suffered one humiliating defeat after another. The boy could see patterns faster than Rafferty could blink. It wouldn't have been so bad if the kid hadn't laughed, an irritating roosterlike sound, every time Rafferty made a mistake.
'Not so long ago,' Rafferty said in English, 'I'd have given anything to hear you laugh. Now I'd give anything if you stopped.'
The distraction of the computer gave Rafferty the time he needed to be able to look at Superman without seeing the battered, violated boy in the cheap hotel room. By the fourteenth straight loss, Rafferty could meet the boy's eyes.
While Rafferty stewed over the lack of progress, the boy fixed the garbage disposal, the toaster, the stuck window, the light switch in Miaow's room, the light leaks around the air conditioner, and the combination mechanism on Rafferty's suitcase, which had been permanently locked. He also eradicated the stain on the carpet, to Rose's obvious pleasure.
Rafferty and Rose did not discuss their situation, but there was a lightness to her-in her bearing, in her voice-that made Rafferty smile at inappropriate moments. Superman took to imitating him, which Miaow found hilarious.
On the third night, Rose went home to clean her own place, and without her to provide moral and nutritional guidance, Rafferty took the kids to McDonald's, and they ate their recommended allowance of fat for the decade. On the walk home, he told them the story about the Three Little Pigs, changing it so it ended with a recipe for roast pork. Superman thought the new ending was funny. Miaow didn't.
Rafferty talked them through the crowded sidewalk, improvising a plan to write a fairy-tale cookbook: soap- flavored bread crumbs that children could drop behind them in the woods without the birds eating them, a low- calorie gingerbread house, a wolf's stew with boiled grandmother. Superman made a few contributions, but Miaow walked silently between them. When Rafferty laughed aloud at something the boy suggested, she moved around to Rafferty's other side, so he was in the middle. Accepting the hint, Rafferty let his hand drop lightly onto the back of the boy's neck. Superman gave a tiny start and stopped talking in midword, but he did not move away, and a moment later he picked up where he'd left off.
Rafferty felt like he'd just won a marathon.
They got home and settled happily in the living room, although it felt a little emptier without Rose. Miaow began to cut out the figures from her drawings and paste them together in new combinations, and Rafferty suffered a few more grueling defeats at Tetris. At nine o'clock he put the kids to bed and curled up on the couch with his gun.
He decided he'd had a wonderful day.
Surfacing abruptly from sleep, he answers the wrong phone first, saying hello to the dial tone while the cell phone continues to bleat from across the room. The only light is the city's diffuse glow through the sliding glass door, and he barks his shin on the corner of the coffee table on his way to grab the phone.
'Hello.' He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to focus his attention.
There is a silence. He thinks he can hear traffic in the background.
'Hello,' he says again. 'What time is it anyway?'
After a moment a woman's voice says, 'Three.'
It is an unfamiliar voice, self-possessed and pleasant but reserved, as though its owner is unsure whether to say anything more. Rafferty has to relax his hand on the phone. He is gripping it tightly enough to snap the hinge.
'Hello, Doughnut,' he says.
At first he thinks she will hang up, but then she says, 'Why did I keep the disks?' To his surprise, her English is excellent.
'Because you're on them,' Rafferty says. He grabs a breath and makes the leap he has been considering ever since 'You and your sister.'
He hears a short, reflexive grunt, as though someone has poked her in the gut. 'You looked at the others.'
'Yes.'
'Did you enjoy them?' She drags out the word as though it exerts friction in her throat.
'They're the worst things I ever saw. They set a whole new standard for awful.'
'You had to be there,' she says. 'You want to talk to me. Talk.'
'Face-to-face.'
'Why?'
'I want to see you. I need to see who you are.'
'I'm a girl,' she says. 'There's nothing unusual about me.'
'Oh,' Rafferty says, 'I think there is.'
A siren goes by in the background, and a moment later he hears it in the street below. She is very near.
'I'll call you,' she says. The line goes dead.
Rafferty tiptoes down the hall and looks into Miaow's room. Both children are out cold, the boy snoring softly in the top bunk. His sheet, as always, is on the floor. Rafferty covers him gently and goes into his own room to get dressed.
Silom Road is dark and deserted and insubstantial, the bustle and energy of the day long behind. Shop windows are dim. The neon signs are just drab squiggles in glass. The few lighted windows are five or six stories up, where apartment dwellers face their own sleepless nights. He walks several blocks, looking for a pay phone, before he decides that the quality of the connection made it more likely Doughnut was using a cellular. He keeps walking, aimlessly now, covering another block or two before a tuk-tuk pulls optimistically to the curb, although he has not signaled it.
'Where?' the driver says, gunning the motor happily. He is chubby and cheerful-looking, with a fat mole on his chin that sprouts black hairs long enough for knot practice. The Buddha's belly below the handlebars is tightly sheathed in a T-shirt covered in children's handprints in bright primary colors.
When the Buddha sends you a tuk-tuk, Rafferty thinks, it's probably a sign that you should go somewhere. 'That way.' He indicates the direction in which he is walking and climbs in. The driver pops the clutch, and Rafferty's back slams the back of the seat.
As he accelerates, the driver catches Rafferty studying his face in the rearview mirror and gives him a grin that is extremely rich in gums. 'Where we go, boss?'
'Suppose I killed somebody,' Rafferty says, watching the man's grin slip. 'Where would I put the body?'
He gets a quick lift of the head: The answer is obvious. 'Klong Toey. Everybody use Klong Toey.'
'But the police would find it if I left it in Klong Toey.'
The man purses his lips. 'River,' he says.
Rafferty says, 'But where? Somebody would see me if I dropped it over a bridge.'
'Small soi, not so many houses. Better than a bridge.'
'Show me.'
'How many place you want to see?'
'How many can you show me?'
A shrug. 'Ten, fifteen.'
'How do you know where they are?'
'Police find a body,' the driver says. 'Everybody comes to look. They need tuk-tuks.'
'Okay, show me the best place. Near Pratunam.'
Within twenty minutes Rafferty has seen six places, all within an easy drive from Claus Ulrich's apartment, from which a weighted body could have been dropped into the Chao Phraya unobserved. He and the driver sit musing, the little two-stroke engine popping away, as the river glides by, its waters a thick reddish brown, opaque with silt carried down from the north. There could be a sunken city two feet beneath the surface, Rafferty thinks, and no one would ever know it. Cup water in your hands and you couldn't see your palms.
