“It’s none of your fucking business. You get your ass across that street before I count to ten, or I’ll kick you all the way across it.” He reaches down and grabs Peep, snatching him from her lap and hauling him up by one arm, and Peep starts to scream. Da is up immediately, reaching for Peep, and when Kep is slow to release the boy’s arm, she sinks her nails into the man’s wrist.
He yanks his hand back as she struggles against Peep’s sudden weight. Kep looks in disbelief at the red welts on his skin. “That’s it, you bitch,” he says. “You have no idea what you’re in for. Now get over there.”
With Peep in her arms, she negotiates the traffic, her heart pounding in her throat. She is so shaken she can’t follow what’s happening around her: It’s a series of quick, still, semitransparent pictures as though the world were reflected in a bubble that pops after a moment, and then there’s another bubble inside that, and then that pops, and inside that one…
Then, somehow, she is on the other side of the road. She spreads her blanket and sinks trembling onto it, absently bouncing Peep against her breast to quiet him. To quiet herself. Across the way, the woman holds her bowl up, her arm raised at the awkward angle of someone imploring mercy, her head sharply down. Kep is nowhere in sight.
When she can keep her hands steady, Da takes her bowl and puts it in front of her on the pavement. Upside down.
First, get Rose and Miaow out of the line of fire. Somehow. Second, separate Ton temporarily from his muscle, even if it’s only for personal satisfaction. The muscle is vulnerable, even if Ton isn’t. The muscle can be made to bleed. Third, disappear.
Fourth, work out what they really want.
It can’t actually be a book. The timing doesn’t make sense. If they’re worried about Pan suddenly announcing that he’s running for office, what good is a book going to do? It’ll take months to print and distribute, assuming that Rafferty lives long enough to write it.
Whatever it is, they’ll need it faster than that.
He studies the list of names on the yellow sheets, looking for what they have in common beyond their animus toward Pan. All but two, one of whom was Weecherat, are male. All but three are in business, according to the addresses, which are either in care of a company or are suite numbers in business buildings. He tries to pair the names with the faces he saw at Pan’s party and realizes they are all approximately the same age, in their late fifties or early sixties. Once again Weecherat was an exception. They probably chose her because she’d written unflatteringly about Pan, and, of course, when they’d put her name on the list, Rafferty hadn’t yet heard the number of the floor Ton’s office was on. They had no way of knowing he’d try to use that information for insurance.
The yellow scarf comes into his mind’s eye, her preoccupation with the drape of the scarf. The way her face had softened when she mentioned her daughter.
He fights down the anger and the guilt and makes notes, just to process the information with both his mind and his hand, to see what links might open up. Doesn’t see a meaning behind the patterns, although there’s an elusive little flicker there somewhere.
His mind keeps wandering into scenarios, based on assumptions about what it is that Ton and his accomplices might really want. He follows one line of plausibility to its end-a bad end-and backs up and starts over. This time, with slightly different variables, the process takes him to a different end, different but still bad. Start again, factor in a new initiative on his part, and this time the ending is, to view it charitably, ambiguous. Maybe ambiguous is the best he can hope for. Maybe ambiguous should sound good to him.
The tuna salad in front of him has warmed to room temperature as the restaurant has filled and then emptied around him. Now the waitresses straighten the room, squaring the chairs and dusting the seats, laying down new linen, folding napkins and wiping their fingerprints off clean glasses, joking and talking quietly, and glancing over at him from time to time. They notice that he seems to be completely unaware of them, just staring through the window and sometimes making a note in the little notebook in front of him.
And he’s cute, one of them says. Is he part Thai?
“Have problem?” she says.
Rafferty almost jumps out of his seat. He had no idea anyone was near, much less standing at his elbow. He looks up to see a girl of seventeen or eighteen, cute in a baby-puffy way, wearing the kind of accessories that girls her age in the United States would either scorn as cluelessly uncool or embrace as post-retro irony: Hello Kitty earrings, little butterfly hair clips, a long curved comb at the back of her head, decorated with a row of hearts, to pull the long black hair out of the way.
