“I’m sorry,” Da says, drying her cheeks on her T-shirt. “I just felt like I was back home.”
WITH ANOTHER NINETY minutes on tape in the apartment downstairs, and with Rose back in bed and Miaow reading in her room, Rafferty has time on his hands. When he came home the previous evening, he’d been able to spot two of the people watching the apartment. He’d guess that there’s one more, one assigned to each of them. The third one had undoubtedly been behind Rafferty, following him, and probably peeled off when he saw Rafferty was going home, probably called the others for confirmation that Rafferty had actually arrived and entered the building. There’s not that much traffic on Rafferty’s soi. No point in the follower drawing attention to himself.
Probably two shifts, possibly even three, since apparently money is no object. Not much use trying to memorize all the faces when they’ll change in a few hours. He figures that they’ve chosen their surveillance spots and that by and large they’ll stick to them, so he’ll keep an eye on those places. He needs to find spot number three.
And soon. His best guess is that he can continue for another day, two or three at most, to do a convincing imitation of someone who thinks he has a book to write. If they’re unconvinced, there’s nothing to say they won’t grab either Rose or Miaow as a way of holding his feet to the fire.
To get whatever it is they really want.
How would Ton be working the surveillance? The watchers are in the street. The microphones are in the ceiling. Presumably someone is listening in real time, and the two groups, the watchers and the listeners, are communicating. When the information from inside the apartment indicates that the family won’t be going anywhere, all but one of the watchers are probably encouraged to leave their positions. No sense drawing attention to themselves needlessly. They’d be somewhere nearby, most likely someplace crowded out on Silom, with cell phones. When the listeners hear that someone is going to leave the building, all of them would get a call and move into their spots.
Maybe the best thing to do is to separate them. The three of them go out and head in a different direction, put some distance between them, and then…
And then…what? If one member of the family disappears, Ton’s guys will probably kill the other two. Rafferty has to take Weecherat’s murder as a message. Rose and Miaow need to vanish at the same time, and then Rafferty needs to become invisible, too.
Information overload, he thinks. There’s a lot of information going to Ton’s men, between the sounds coming in over the microphones and what the watchers are seeing. They’ll be comfortable, maybe a little lax. All those eyes, all those ears. He needs to exploit that. Create a disconnect of some kind, a contradiction between what they hear and what they see, and use the confusion to make two people vanish in plain sight. Up until now he’s been focused on figuring out how to make them think that Rose and Miaow are still in the apartment for a day or so after they’ve left it. He’s been trusting himself to come up with the way to
Putting second things first.
He looks at his watch: 9:25. Time to imitate a writer. He puts the yellow list on the table and starts to dial numbers. He starts with the cop and then moves to the gangster.
THEIR BELLIES ARE full. Peep is clean and freshly diapered, engrossed in a bottle of formula from Foodland. Da and Boo sit on the riverbank in the shade, watching the river slide by.
“I don’t know what I can do for you,” Da says. “I’m probably too old to help you with those cops. Peep’s too young. We’re just two more mouths for you to feed. And you did all that-I mean, Kep and all of it-for me.”
Boo watches a gleaming white cruiser speed upstream. The reddish brown water parts before it, sluicing up over the sides, all the way up to the big red letters that say RIVER QUEEN.
“Rich people,” he says. “That’s from the Queen Hotel. Rich
Da says, “In Ayutthaya?”
“No, Da,” Boo says with exaggerated patience, “not in Ayutthaya. At the Queen Hotel.”
“How would I know? I’ve never even been in a hotel.”
“Three hundred, four hundred dollars,” he says. “Some of the rooms cost more than a thousand dollars.”
Da looks over at him. It sounds like a lot of money. “How many baht?”
“More than thirty thousand.”
“Thirty thousand? My whole village didn’t have thirty thousand baht.”
