herself shorter. He can hear only snatches of what she is saying, but she has pitched her voice slightly higher, emphasizing its girlishness. The charade puzzles him; she has plucked the boy from the street, but she is apologizing for it, exaggerating the boy's dominance.
The crowd of pedestrians parts momentarily, and Rafferty spots a boy to their right. Since Miaow came into his life, he sees street children everywhere, but they have multiplied since the tsunami ravaged Phuket and Phang Nga three months earlier, a wave of children washed all the way to Bangkok, leaving behind an island many Thais believe is now haunted by scores of anguished ghosts. The boy to their right wears the threadbare, oversize uniform of the street, stained as brown as a used tea bag. He sags against a building as though it is the only thing holding him up. Rafferty watches as the child notices Miaow-as always, he wonders, does this child know her? — and sees him look beyond her to Superman. The boy straightens instantly, a single, electrified movement, and cranes his head forward, narrowing his eyes. Then, very slowly, he begins to walk, parallel with Miaow's path, his eyes glued to Superman. When Superman senses the scrutiny and glances over, the boy freezes. Then he turns and runs as though all of Phuket's ghosts are after him.
With profound conviction, Rafferty says, 'Oh, shit.'
'He's terrified,' Rose says. She turns to watch the boy run. 'What are you getting us into?'
Patpong Road opens up on their right, the neon signs above the bars just beginning to snap on. The young women who dance in the clubs push their way up the street in jeans and loose T-shirts, their black hair wet and gleaming. 'Get them home,' he says. 'I'll go to the pharmacy here and pick up the stuff. Can you think of anything else we'll need?'
'Shirt and pants,' she says, sizing the boy up. 'Size ten.' She gives Patpong an unfriendly glance; she was once the top girl at the King's Castle bar, probably the most famous of them all. 'Blue,' she adds, glancing back at the children.
Above them the sign for yet another bar blooms bright pink with a sizzle of juice. 'Only shopping, right?' Three girls shoulder by them, laughing their way to work, two of them giving Rafferty a practiced eye. 'No bars.'
'Of course,' Rafferty says. 'No bars.' He gazes at Superman's bruised and sullen face, and the child turns away to stare into the traffic.
'On the other hand,' Rose says, 'the bars might be safer than this boy.'
4
In the light of day, Patpong Road is slow, even sleepy, a short block of closed doors and open pharmacies. On a map of Bangkok's population density, Patpong at 3:00 P.M. would be a watercolor wash of pale gray. By 7:30 on any given night, it would be solid black, the bars and sidewalks crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with perhaps twelve hundred young women and the men who come to rent their favors.
Like most male expatriates, Poke Rafferty arrived in Bangkok alone, and like most of them he found his way to Patpong, but not for the usual reason. He came to write a book, Looking for Trouble in Thailand. The first books in the series, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines and Looking for Trouble in Indonesia, had done well enough to earn him an attention-getting advance for book number three, and the money took Rafferty to Thailand.
The readers of the Looking for Trouble books are males in their twenties and early thirties, obsessed with knowing things like how to beat official foreign-exchange rates, how to spot fake amber (hold a match under it), how much to bribe a cop, how to recognize counterfeit tens (look for the number 28 on one corner of the back of the bill), how to identify a transvestite before it's too late, and how to know, within an hour of arriving in a strange city, where to find the best bars, the best clubs, the best food, the best clothes, the dodgiest entertainment, at the best prices. It's a small niche, but Rafferty owns it.
By the time he finished the book, he was also finished with Patpong. He'd asked his questions, gotten his answers, written his chapters, and departed from professional objectivity to take home more dancers than he can comfortably remember. He knows now how the machine works, knows how coldhearted are the mathematics behind the smiles. Whatever tawdry allure the street may have possessed has evaporated.
On the other hand, he'd met both Rose and Miaow here, so he feels he owes the street something. He can't bring himself to hate it with the same intensity Rose does, but like her he has used the street up. His heart now is entirely with her and Miaow, the family he has cobbled together with a former go-go dancer and a child selling chewing gum from a box, one of the heartbreaking legion of sidewalk sparrows who haunt the Bangkok night. Slowly, by keeping faith with them, by making promises carefully and meeting them, he has begun to make it work.
Miaow does not trust easily. In her short lifetime, she has been betrayed, abandoned, cheated, and probably abused in ways he has never dared to ask about. Even with Rose's help, it has taken him months to win her confidence. He has given her much, while she has asked for nothing.
Cartier, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Armani: watches, purses, blouses, scarves, all of them lacking the only accurate label: 'Fraudulent.' Stale sweat, cheap perfume, cigarette smoke. Frying garlic. The thunk of big-hair eighties rock and roll from the bars. A bottle hitting the pavement. He picks his way between the bright lights of the Patpong night market without registering the glitter of the jewelry and sunglasses, the colors of the textiles, the sweating crowd, or the broken-record calls of the touts pushing Ping-Pong shows, razor-blade shows, and other improbable vaginal feats.
The boy can't stay with them.
Two children will be noticed and misinterpreted, perhaps officially. At this moment, with Rafferty on the verge of making the moves that will legalize the bonds among him, Rose, and Miaow, that kind of trouble would be unendurable. If he succeeds, they will legally be a family. If he fails, he will have lost the center of his life. He can't let that happen.
But Miaow has finally asked Rafferty to do something for her. On one level, he supposes, it's good news. She has developed enough faith in him to ask the impossible.
So what does he do? Think short-term: Get rid of the boy's scabies.
Rafferty is edging his way toward one particular stall when he turns at the sound of his name being mispronounced.
'Poque.' The voice, a theatrical basso profundo, belongs to an elephantine man in a flowery shirt as big as a fumigation tent. He somehow manages to insinuate several redundant European vowels into the single syllable of Rafferty's first name. 'A word or two?'
'Leon,' Rafferty says. On the very long list of people he would rather not see right now, Leon Hofstedler occupies the top position. 'Is the bar on fire? Are they renovating your stool?'
'American humor is the envy of the world,' Hofstedler says solemnly.
Hofstedler imagines himself as the heart of a small group of permanent sex tourists-Rafferty thinks of them as 'sexpatriots'-who spend most of their waking hours in the eternal twilight of the Expat Bar on Patpong 1, solemnly swapping lies and denying that they buy Viagra in bulk. The bar is probably the only place in Thailand where the television has been unplugged to avoid the endless repetition of the huge waves sweeping away so much of the south. Mass death dampens the patrons' libidos.
'That's six or seven words already, Leon.' Rafferty resists the urge to shift from foot to foot. 'I'm kind of on an errand here.'
'Ze beautiful Rose.' Hofstedler puckers his lips for a whistle and then, wisely, thinks better of it. 'I would be busy, too, if I were so lucky as you. But zis-this-is about someone substantially less alluring.'
'Everyone's less alluring, Leon. But who specifically?'
'You are being sought.' Hofstedler's voice drops an impossible octave. He occasionally claims to have spent his youth carrying a spear in some of the world's longest and murkiest operas, and he retains an impressive bass range and a Wagnerian sense of drama. 'Sought,' he repeats, 'by a woman of mystery.'
'Okay,' Rafferty says.
If Hofstedler is disappointed that Poke fails to clutch his chest and stagger backward, he doesn't show it. 'She
