'He was a very big man,' he says aloud, without realizing he is speaking.
'Wrap him in a big sheet,' the driver suggests. He became voluble when he realized Rafferty could speak Thai, and he has entered completely into the spirit of this hypothetical murder. He twists the hairs growing out of his mole as inspiration strikes. 'Dye it black so you can carry it at night.'
'That's good, but getting him here…She's just one woman, and I don't think she's a big one.'
The driver pulls a packet of Krong Thip cigarettes from his shirt pocket and fires one up. 'Cut him in pieces.'
The stains on the bathroom floor. 'Make four or five trips carrying an arm, a leg? That's a lot of back-and- forth. Somebody would notice.'
'Boyfriend,' the driver proposes instantly. 'Kill fat husband, get help from skinny boyfriend.'
'Could be.' Up until now he has always seen Doughnut acting alone. On the other hand, there were the four men who beat him up in the soi.
There is a pause while they both think, and then the driver says, 'Good man, bad man?'
'Very bad man.'
The driver's face glows red from the coal on his cigarette. 'So no problem. One bad person dead. Plenty left.'
This is an argument Rafferty has been getting a lot of. 'Let's go home.' He is suddenly light-headed from lack of sleep. He has a disorienting sensation of motion, as though the river were still and they were gliding sideways.
By the time he walks into the apartment, it is four-thirty. The kids are still asleep, Superman's sheet once more on the floor. He picks it up and covers the boy again, and Superman stirs and his eyes half open. Rafferty is startled by how fast he moves. Within less than a second, he is curled against the wall, knees drawn up protectively, glaring at Rafferty. His teeth are bared.
'No problem,' Rafferty says. He takes a step back. 'You dropped your sheet.'
The boy looks down at the sheet and then up at Rafferty. The tautness slowly goes out of his face, and he nods. He covers himself and stretches out again but keeps his eyes open and fixed on Rafferty's face.
'Go to sleep,' Rafferty says, in what he hopes is a fatherly tone. He leaves the room and closes the door all the way so Superman can hear the latch click home.
He makes a silent cup of Nescafe and sips at it. Grim as sin. The Nescafe performs the desired sabotage on his central nervous system, and Madame Wing makes an unexpected appearance in his mind's eye.
What had she looked like when she was younger? She is thin in a way that says she has never been fat: she has the gauntness of someone whose appetites have nothing to do with food. She would have had those terrifying eyes even then, set into a face that was young and old at the same time; she would never have shone with the soft flush of youth. Even at eighteen, he thinks, she would look like someone who had never been out of doors, who had never shared a secret, who had never lost her heart. She has the face of an animal with multiple sets of teeth.
A whole new kind of hatred, Arthit had said. Collect ten million baht, shred it, and return it, just to cause her pain. The pain more important than the profit.
Claus Ulrich had probably inspired a new kind of hatred, too.
He is assuming Ulrich is dead.
Suppose he's not, though. Uncle Claus has demonstrated a talent for living inconspicuously, although his weight makes him a conspicuous man. But if a ghost were to appear from his past, a grown and dangerous version of someone he never thought could be a threat to him, someone he saw as a passive object, to be tormented at will-what would he do? Wouldn't a man like Claus Ulrich have a bolt-hole handy in case someone like Doughnut did appear? Or would he even recognize her? Twenty years in the same city is a long time, no matter how reclusive you are. He could have encountered dozens of them by now, grown up beyond recognition.
But they would remember him.
Five cups of coffee later, Rafferty is still on the couch, Miaow has left for school, and the phone finally rings. He grabs the receiver, expecting it to be Doughnut. Instead it is Arthit.
'Get a motorcycle taxi,' he says. 'Take your cell phone. Your guard is on the move.'
34
The motorcycle hits a pothole, and Rafferty is momentarily weightless. Then, as he hits the seat, he emphatically isn't.
'We're turning,' Rafferty's motorcycle driver shouts into the wind blowing over his shoulder. 'Hang on.'
For a long, stomach-sinking moment, Rafferty has the sensation of being almost parallel to the surface of the road as the tires squeal, slide sickeningly, and grip again. Then they are upright, and he focuses on the spots of light doing a Busby Berkeley number behind his closed eyelids. The cell phone pasted to his ear is slick with sweat.
'How far from Sukhumvit Soi 28?' Rafferty asks his driver.
'Three or four minutes.'
He opens his eyes in time to see the gray iron wall of a truck's side inches from his elbow.
Rafferty has promised the driver two thousand baht for speed, an exorbitant sum, and the bike is at full throttle. Rush-hour cars and trucks hurtle by in a blur or loom massively in front of them, slipping past at the last possible second by a few slim inches. He has a vision of himself spread across the roadway like peanut butter. A blind man could follow them by listening to the horns.
He forces himself to look past the traffic and focus on a more distant blur that resolves itself into shop fronts: tailors' shops, jewelry stores, a coffin maker, a watch shop called Lovely Hours, a sign that says, in English, WE HAVE ALL KINDS GRIT. In other words, a typical Bangkok block. 'Can we go any faster?'
The driver starts to turn his head and thinks better of it. 'You're joking.'
'He still hasn't looked back,' Cho says through the cell phone.
'We're almost there,' Rafferty says. 'Just keep him in sight.' They hurtle past a sedan, children's startled hands and faces pressed to the windows watching the crazy farang and his driver trying to kill themselves.
'Wait, wait,' Cho says on the phone. 'They're slowing down. They're…um, they're pulling over to the curb.'
'Is he getting out?' Rafferty asks Cho.
'No. Just sitting there.'
Rafferty's stomach takes an anxious dip. 'Maybe he spotted you.'
'I don't think so. Hold it. A motorcycle taxi stopped next to the cab. The passenger is getting off it.'
'What's he look like? Does he have a bad hand?'
'Yes, the left. He's getting in the car. He's got a blue bag with him. Like a bowling bag or something. Oh, my golly,' Cho says, a librarian to his fingertips. 'They're moving.'
'Sukhumvit coming up,' says Rafferty's driver. The bike down-shifts and slows. 'Hang on. Turn.'
Once again the bike yaws wildly, and Rafferty is flying sideways through the air, gripping the seat between his knees with all the strength he possesses. When they are vertical again, the driver says, 'Sukhumvit,' as proudly as if he'd named it himself. The road stretches wide and congested in front of them, the sky crisscrossed with more electrical wires than any city would seem to need.
'What soi?'
'Thirty-two,' Cho says, and Rafferty's driver says, 'Sixteen.'
'This is interesting,' Cho says musingly. 'That's really inter-'
'Cho, I swear-'
'The motorbike is staying right behind the taxi.'
'Get closer. I don't want him getting back on that motorbike. Run over the goddamned thing if you have to. What color is the car, Cho?' The motorcycle is zipping between lanes of relatively slow-moving cars, their rearview
