'The clip,' Rafferty says. 'These things cost money.'
The man slowly hands it over, watches with total concentration as Rafferty slips the clip back in and secures the automatic beneath his waistband. Then he nods, and Rafferty turns to face Doughnut.
At first glance she is completely unremarkable, someone he would pass on the street and not remember a moment later. He would put her in her forties, but he knows she can't be. The photos on the missing disks were taken toward the end of the eighties, and she must have been ten to twelve at the time, like the other children in the AT Series. She can't be much older than twenty-nine or thirty. After what she has lived through, he thinks, she should look eighty.
Shoulder-length hair, painstakingly parted and brushed, frames a round, somewhat flat face with the low nose and full lips of Isaan. Her skin is dark, unlightened by makeup, its duskiness emphasized by a fine white scar that runs the length of her chin, the result of a slicing wound. She wears the prim pastel clothes of an office lady, a bank teller, someone with a job in the safe world.
The eyes don't look at the safe world. They are black, the purest, deepest black, and they seem to be set several inches behind the face, like those of someone holding up a costume mask and peering through it. Someone with a lot of practice at estimating arm's reach and staying outside it.
She submits patiently to his gaze and then gives him a perfunctory smile that tells him he's looked long enough. 'Just a flower seller.'
'You're just a flower seller,' Rafferty says, 'in the same way Joan of Arc was just a farm girl.'
She turns without a word and leads him down the aisle, the four men trailing behind, Joan of Arc's soldiers in T-shirts and plastic flip-flops. They make two turns, and Rafferty has no idea what direction they're going in.
'Here,' Doughnut says. They have reached a rickety structure, roughly square and no more than ten feet on a side, framed in unfinished lumber. Chicken wire nailed to the uprights turns it into a cage of sorts. A table, four feet square and topped with scarred plywood, tilts alarmingly in the center of the cage. Flowers stretch away in all directions, sullen smears of color. Doughnut opens a plywood door and stands aside. 'Okay?'
'And if it weren't?' She follows him in without answering. 'Your office?'
'Might be, might not be.' She closes the door and takes the seat nearest it. Rafferty takes the seat opposite and sees that the open door concealed a television set wired to a VCR.
'So you're Poke,' Doughnut says when she is settled. She beats a quick tattoo on the tabletop with her fingernails. 'And you think I'm going to tell you my story.'
'It's me or the police.' He places a hand on the table, and it dips a couple of inches and rocks up again. One leg too short.
She leans back and puts one arm up, over the back of her chair. 'Why would I be afraid of the police?'
He sits opposite her. His chair rocks, too. 'Because you killed Claus Ulrich.'
Doughnut looks like she is stifling a yawn. 'You can prove this?'
'I don't have to. You were there. You disappeared. You left bloodstains. You were in the pictures. For the cops that's a royal flush: means, motive, opportunity.'
A golden box of Dunhill cigarettes appears on the table, along with a slender silver lighter, either a Mark Cross or a good knockoff. 'The police don't actually need anything. They just manufacture what they don't have.' She flips the box open, one-handed. 'Why would my story interest you?'
'Because a nice lady came all the way from Australia to learn what happened to Claus, and I told her I'd find out.'
She lights up and plumes smoke from her nostrils. 'The famous niece, I suppose.' She rolls the tip of her cigarette gently on the plywood surface of the table to remove a film of ash. The corners of her mouth go down, her first overt display of emotion. 'So she asked you. And you always do what you say you'll do?'
'It makes it easier to get up in the morning.'
The four men are arrayed behind her, tallest to shortest, as though they've lined up for a photo, peering in through the chicken wire. She turns to see what he is looking at and waves the men away with the hand holding the cigarette. They melt like gnomes into the flowers. Several moments pass, measured in exhalations of smoke. 'Let's see,' she says at last. 'I have a question for you first. Do you think murder is a crime?'
After the week he has had, there is only one truthful reply. 'I used to.'
She gazes at the cigarette, turning it in her hand so she can read the gold writing on the filter. 'If I killed Claus Ulrich, was that a crime?'
'I saw the pictures,' he says.
'So what you're saying is, I tell you my story and then wait while you decide my fate.'
Rafferty shifts in the hard chair. 'I'm not really comfortable with playing judge.'
She smiles slightly at the evasion. 'But that's what you're doing.'
'I think I'd like a cigarette.' He hasn't smoked in almost a year.
She extends the pack and the lighter. 'This makes you nervous?' She is very calm.
'I'd smoke used toilet paper to get rid of the smell of these flowers.'
'Too much of anything will make you sick,' she says. 'Unless you're already sick, of course.' She watches him light up. The lighter is a real Mark Cross. He turns it over and sees the initials 'C.U.' engraved in a flowing script, fancy as a minaret. 'It was his,' she says.
Rafferty turns the lighter over in his hand. 'You left an awful lot there. Money, watches, all sorts of stuff. Why take this?'
'I didn't want anything he'd touched. But he used this.' Her gaze floats over his left shoulder, unfocused. 'Do you remember the red candles?'
'I'll remember them my whole life.' The flame haloed in the photographs, the spills of hot wax across the children's abdomens.
'So will I. So will Toom.' She meets his eyes and gives him the perfunctory smile again. 'My older sister. Toom.'
'How did he get his hands on you?'
She regards him for a moment as though he is a distance she will have to cross, and then she sighs. 'My mother sold us when I was ten and Toom was twelve,' she says. 'A lady came from Bangkok and promised my mother she could find us good work in the city. Washing dishes in a restaurant, she said. When we got bigger, we could be waitresses, with uniforms, two for each of us. She showed my mother a big color picture of the uniform. How I wanted to wear those clothes. I still remember exactly what they looked like.' She draws a finger down the scar on her chin, and Rafferty would bet she doesn't know she's doing it. 'The lady told my mother we could make two or three hundred dollars a month in the restaurant. My father didn't earn two hundred dollars in a year. She offered an advance on our salary. Is any of this new to you?'
People are beginning to move past them, choosing the blooms they will sell in the shops, in the streets. They glance incuriously at the two of them, just a farang and a Thai woman, having a conversation, probably bargaining over the price of flowers. 'I know about it in the abstract, as something that happens. As a personal story, it's new.'
'I'm aware it's not original. The same thing happened to the other girls in the house.'
'What house?'
She shakes her head impatiently. 'The one that wasn't a restaurant. Everything that happened to any of us happened to all of us.'
Rafferty tries to keep the revulsion out of his voice. 'You were ten.'
'Almost eleven. And it hurt more than I could believe. But not for long, at least, you know, not down there. I didn't stay eleven for long either. It was interesting. In no time at all, I was older than my sister. Even though she was twelve. She was the one who kept crying. I was the one who decided, as you Americans like to say, 'Fuck this.''
'You tried to escape?'
'Of course. The first time I didn't even get out of the building. They used wet towels on us. No marks, you see. Customers don't like scarred girls. They hit us until their arms got tired, and then they gave up. Just locked us up. Toom hadn't tried to get away, but they beat her anyway, just to show me what would happen if I did it again.'
There is heat inside Rafferty's chest. 'Who were they?'
'Two Chinese men. Lee and Kwan. They were brothers and they owned the house, the restaurant, everything.
