explain it after dinner.' He takes a napkin from the sandwich plate and wipes the spittle from Chouk's face.
'Not hungry.' Superman has not taken his eyes off Chouk. He purses his lips, and Rafferty thinks he will spit again, but instead he stalks from the room, slamming the door behind him.
'A warrior,' Chouk says. 'Is he yours?'
'Apparently.' Rafferty turns on the bedside light, squinting against the glare, and begins to open the folder.
'Wait,' Chouk says. 'Before you look at it, let me tell you what it is.'
He shifts a little in the bed. 'Just in case anyone still doubted that Pol Pot was insane, he declared war on Vietnam. This was the country that had just defeated America. They were better armed than the Russians. The war lasted two weeks, and then the Vietnamese came.'
'And bless them for it.'
'We were already in Tuol Sleng by then. When a subject was sent to Tuol Sleng, his family went with him. So my wife and children were there, too.' He stops, and his eyes go to the folder. 'My wife and children,' he repeats.
'Tuol Sleng was a summer camp for monsters, but they were precise monsters. The precision took the form of exhaustive files on every prisoner who entered the prison: the charges against them, the forms of torture used during the interrogation, the confession, and the date of death. We were all going to die, of course. It was like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: sentence first, verdict afterward. Every prisoner was photographed, sometimes just before they were killed. The highest-ranking prisoners were photographed dead, as proof for Pol Pot and the other fat boys. There were thousands of photographs.'
'I've seen some of them.'
'A man named Duch headed up the operation, but the interrogators did most of the work. The head female interrogator was called Keck.'
The two men look at each other, and Rafferty says, 'Madame Wing.'
'We had been there a week when she killed my wife and daughters. She killed my oldest daughter first, in front of my wife. She was trying to make my wife say I was a CIA agent. Tiara was a beautiful girl, so she began by cutting off her nose. She did it with a razor, and she made my wife sharpen the razor. She told my wife, 'The sharper it is, the less it will hurt.''
He is looking at the blanket now, and tears are falling from his downturned face. 'She murdered them all. She saved my wife for last and killed her with me in the room. She made it go on for two days. I was shackled hand and foot while she worked. There was nothing personal in it as far as Keck was concerned. It was what she did, eight hours a day. She took pleasure from it, but it wasn't personal. They could have been anyone, as long as they had nerves and tears and blood and bone. I could have been anyone, as long as I loved them, as long as it hurt me to watch. It wasn't enough to maim us, to kill us. First they had to drive a nail through our hearts.'
Rafferty draws a couple of deep breaths. 'Why are you alive?'
'Pol Pot's war against Vietnam. The Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh, and the guards and interrogators ran. They had just started on me. I guess you could say I was lucky. After my first session, they returned me to the group cells. As soon as the Vietnamese entered Phnom Penh, the interrogators killed everyone in the interrogation rooms, and then they went to get the files. When the Vietnamese arrived, they found bodies everywhere and seven of us alive. In one room there were two filing cabinets full of photos. One drawer was empty. It had held pictures of the interrogators at work. Keck emptied it. I saw her leave with it.' He glances down at the folder in Rafferty's lap. 'With that.'
'This is hardly a drawer's worth.'
'I don't know what happened to the rest. She may have thrown them away. She may have sold them, one at a time, to the people who were in them. Those are the pictures of her. You can look at them now.'
The folder opens too easily for what it contains.
The first thing he sees is Keck's eyes. They look out of a gaunt younger woman's face. The flesh beneath the skin has been burned away by the rage that animates the face. The eyes could be looking at a barren landscape, a blasted tree, the face of the moon. They have no time for anything living.
The other pictures are unendurable. Flesh tears, bones snap. Keck's long fingers slice and probe. The luminous eyes look down as from a great altitude, as though the living beings she is driving mad with pain are as distant as ships slipping below the horizon.
Rafferty looks at the top sheet and closes his eyes. While they are still closed, he shuts the folder. When he opens his eyes, Chouk is studying him to assess his reaction. 'Why would she keep these?'
'The same reason people keep photos from their school days, or of their families. It was the best time in her life. She was happy.'
'How did you find her?'
He shakes his head. 'It was easy. It took some time, but it was easy. She had been stealing money for years, taking everything people owned-cash, gold, art, everything-and promising them freedom. Then she had them killed. She put it all in Thai banks, millions and millions of baht. With that kind of money here, I knew she'd buy a house. She needed the security of a house, someplace she could hide in, someplace with open space around it, where she could see people coming. Where she could have guards. So it had to be a house, a big house. With walls. She needed a prison. From one prison to another.' He sighs. 'I searched the city records. Not that many expensive houses are registered in women's names. I found about forty that had been bought fifteen to twenty years ago. Out of those, only a dozen were walled off. I went to those one at a time, waiting outside until I saw a woman of the right age. She drove out of the ninth house I watched, the second day I was there. I knew her the moment I saw her.'
'The eyes,' Rafferty says.
'Of course.'
'Did she see you?'
'It didn't matter. She wouldn't have recognized me anyway. I was one of thousands. When she was finished, she forgot us instantly. We were interesting only while she had us chained to the bed frame.'
'Well, shit,' Rafferty says. 'It's a shame you didn't get her before I found you.'
'Nothing to be done,' Chouk says. 'I took too long. This is what I deserve. It wasn't right for me to want her to suffer that way.'
'Yeah, but it's not what she deserves. Why not give the pictures to the cops or send them to the newspapers?' He knows the answer as he asks the questions.
'The papers wouldn't print them without proof the woman in them was Madame Wing. The police would just go to her and demand more money. There's no way to prove who she is, and she's got enough money to satisfy even them.'
'A little while ago, you said it was too late for you to finish. What did that mean?'
'I made myself a promise,' he says. 'Two days from now is the twenty-seventh anniversary of my wife's death. I vowed that one of us would be dead by then.' He lifts the chained hand and lets it drop again. 'And now look at me.' The tears start to flow again. 'So she lives to a ripe old age.'
Rafferty automatically picks up the plate and the empty bottles. His mind is working so fast he doesn't know what his hands are doing. 'Well,' he says, 'let's not leap to conclusions.'
36
Dinner is pineapple pizza, brought back from Silom by Superman. During the time he is gone, Miaow sets the table, filling a vase with cutouts of flowers she has colored on heavy paper, which seems to be a special touch for the boy. The flowers give the table a bright, cartoonish touch, although Superman barely seems to notice them. He keeps his eyes on the table. But he eats.
Rafferty moves aimlessly from room to room in a fog of fury, arguing with himself and losing. It's not so much, he tells himself, that what he has in mind will probably result in Madame Wing's death; it's that he will be
