“Of course not,” the man says. “You copy the information onto the legal pad and take it away in your own handwriting. And you leave the pen on the table.”
“I like the pen.”
“Fine. One of my men will buy a box of them and then, when no one is in your apartment, he’ll pick your locks and put them on your daughter’s pillow. That’s the bedroom to the left of the front door, I believe. Before you get to the bathroom.”
Rafferty sits for a long moment, feeling the blood pound in his ears. Then he picks up the pen and begins to write.
Standing on the sidewalk, counting to fifteen as he’s been told to do before removing the hood, Rafferty smells something tantalizingly familiar. He hears the surge of the car’s engine. At the count of twelve, he pulls off the hood and finds himself in a small soi. At the end, a black Lincoln Town Car makes a left onto a broad and busy boulevard. Mud has been smeared over the license plate.
Two passing women look at him, standing there, dangling a brown pillowcase from one hand. One of them says something, and they giggle. They step into the street to avoid him.
He needs to know where he is, but before that he needs to know he still has a family. He yanks his cell phone from his pocket with so much force that he pulls the pocket inside out. Baht notes flutter to the pavement. He leaves them there, just putting a foot on one, as he dials.
Rose answers on the second ring.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“I’m making noodles. Does that sound okay?”
“Sounds like heaven.” He stoops to pick up the money.
“I’m such a housewife,” Rose says. “If anyone had told me three years ago I’d be awake at this hour, making noodles with an apron on, I’d have laughed at them.”
“I knew it, though,” Rafferty says. “I knew the first moment I saw you, up on that stage wearing ten sequins and that crooked tinfoil halo, that there was a vacuum cleaner in your future.”
“Good thing you didn’t say it. I’d have had them throw you out of the bar.”
“Listen,” he says. “Be careful today. Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know. And I think one of us ought to go get Miaow when school’s out.”
Rose sighs and says, “Why does life with you have to be so interesting?”
He says good-bye and works his inverted pocket back inside his pants, then takes a survey. Down at the end of the soi, several stands cluster, nothing more than dusty awnings tacked to the backs of buildings and propped up in front with wooden doweling. As he moves toward them, he sees that they’re selling luggage, mostly knockoffs of Tumi and Louis Vuitton. And then the fragrance in the air resolves itself into curry and basmati rice, and he knows where he is: He’s in the Indian district.
And the ass end of Bangkok, as far as Rafferty is concerned. He knows that it can be difficult to get either a taxi or a
Six dollars a day, he thinks, trudging toward the boulevard.
He stops, halted by the realization that he’s taking refuge in details. The part of his mind that earns its keep by imposing order on the world is offering up bright little beads of factual material for him to string into a reality that doesn’t include anything that’s happened since he sat down at the card game last night: Pan’s drunkenness, the threats, his abduction.
Noi’s pills. The sound of Arthit’s voice when he told Rafferty about them. Noi’s pain.
And today’s displays of naked power.
The floor plan to his apartment. His bank-account and cell-phone numbers. The kind of power most farang never experience.
Rafferty knows Thailand well enough to be aware that people above a certain social and political level are virtually unaccountable, shielded from the consequences of their actions by layers of subordinates and networks of reciprocal favors and graft that corrupt both the police and the courts. These are the people, the “big people,” whom Rose despises, the people who attend dress balls with blood on their hands. There are not many of them, relatively speaking, but they have immense mass and they exert a kind of gravity that bends tens of thousands of lives into the orbit of their will.
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